“We’ll take my husband’s truck then,” Mrs. Knight decided.
The truck bounced up the drive, skidding when the snow gave way to mud. The cottage was set in a clearing that encompassed a barn as well. I knew as soon as I saw the house that this was the one my father would pick. The cottage was big enough for the two of us and was empty, a fact I knew my father would use to his advantage: we could move in right away. More to the point, it was isolated.
I had no bargaining chips. I couldn’t very well lobby for the house with the grotesque toilet, nor could I argue that we should live on a farm. Besides, if it wasn’t our old house in New York, did I really care anyway?
Within the hour my father had made a full-price offer, delighting the Realtor. My father and I stayed at a motel just outside of town for the ten days it took to complete the paperwork, my father driving me in the morning to the Mobil station for milk and doughnuts and after that to school, and then we moved in.
I complained incessantly. The school bus could make it only halfway up our road, and the walk was killing me, I said. My bedroom was freezing. The kids were all retarded, and the teacher was lame. There was no outlet for the hair dryer in the upstairs bathroom, and the shower had no pressure. One night, insisting that my father sit in the den with me while I completed my homework, I badgered him to help me and then interrupted him every time he tried to explain an answer. I mauled a math paper with the metal top of a pencil (popping the erasers off with my teeth was a habit I couldn’t break), tearing the paper and creating a furious scribble in the wood of the coffee table beneath it. My father stood and walked out to the barn. For a time I sat with my pencil in hand. I tried to cover over the gouges in the wood with my spit. I followed my father, preparing a defense as I went: it wasn’t fair; I had no friends; the kids were dorks; the house was spooky. I opened the door to the barn and at first couldn’t see a thing. My father hadn’t turned on the lights. But eventually, in the moonlight through the windows, I spotted him. He stood on the other side of the cavernous room, leaning against a wall. Maybe he was simply having a cigarette, but to my eye he looked exhausted and defeated, a man who knows he has lost everything.
I shut the door as quietly as I could and walked back into the house. I sat on the sofa and completed my homework easily, which I could have done all along. I searched through the cupboards and found a tin of cocoa. I boiled water in a saucepan and made two mugs of hot chocolate. I went out to the barn, carrying the mugs, loudly calling, “Dad,” as I went. Before I reached the door, the lights went on. I walked in as though nothing had transpired in the den barely an hour before. “You want some hot chocolate?” I asked.
Together we sat on a bench and blew over our mugs. “This hits the spot,” he said, the effort in his voice to sound cheerful nothing short of heroic. Neither of us made any mention of the fight we’d just had.
“It’s cold in here,” I said.
“I’m going to try to fix up that woodstove,” he said.
“I was thinking I might like to get some posters for my room.”
“There must be a store in Lebanon where you can buy posters,” he said. “We can check it out this weekend.”
“And the other thing I’m going to need,” I say, “is a desk.”
My father nodded.
“What are you going to do for a job?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, “maybe something with my hands.”
I wake to a hush. The wind has stopped; there’s no pinging against the windows, no whooshing against the glass. The world is completely still, as if resting after its long battle the night before. I hop on bare feet to the window because the floor is cold. The sky is gray, and snow still falls.
I put on my slippers and my bathrobe and open my bedroom door. From the kitchen I can hear the sound of the refrigerator closing. Dad must be up, I think.
But it is not my father I find in the kitchen that morning. Charlotte stands at the stove, spatula in hand. She has on the flannel pj’s with the pink and blue bears and her gray angora socks. I study the cables, and for a moment all I can see is the motel room with its bloodied sheets. I look up at Charlotte’s face.
“I’m making French toast,” she says. Her hair is wet and waved in single ringlets down the back of her neck. Her face is scrubbed and shines clean in the overhead light. “Do you drink coffee?”
“No,” I say. The change in Charlotte is unsettling. She seems rested, but it’s more than that. She’s somehow healthier, more robust.
Three plates and silverware have been placed on the counter near the stove. Charlotte covers one of the plates with two pieces of the toast. “I don’t know if you like syrup or not,” she says, “so I’ll let you do it for yourself.”
“You seem a lot better,” I say.
The golden-tinged toast swims in melted butter. I pour a glass of juice and take my tray to the den. After a couple of minutes Charlotte follows me.
She sits on the sofa and I in my chair, as if we had already established our familial positions. Her tray tilts for a second and the syrup drips onto the flannel of the pj’s. “Sorry,” she says, licking it off with her finger.
She holds her hair back with one hand as she bends over her plate. She cuts her toast with her fork in a frantic motion, scraping the plate. She has the slovenly ease of someone who’s eaten breakfast in the den with me for years.
“How many inches do you think we got?” she asks.
I glance out the window. “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe three feet?”
“Good for the skiers,” she says.
“I’m going skiing after Christmas,” I say.
“Where?”
“Gunstock.”
“You’ll get to paint another mountain,” she says.
“I already bought the paint.”
Charlotte sits back, the tray still balanced on her knees. I look at my breakfast, hardly touched. My appetite has deserted me. I’m not used to this creature who can be heartbroken one minute and bursting with life the next.
“How long will it take to get plowed out?” she asks.
“I’m not sure,” I say. “We’re just about the last road the town gets to. It could take a day, maybe more.”
“That long,” she says, gazing out the window.
I don’t know whether this is good news or bad. I am curious about where Charlotte will go when she leaves us.
Without explanation, I stand and take my tray to the kitchen. I feel nervous in the room with Charlotte, worried that my father will come down and find Charlotte so at ease in our house. I climb the stairs and pause at my father’s door. I put my ear to the wood and can hear nothing. “Dad?” I call softly.
“Come in,” he says from the other side.
He is sitting fully dressed at the edge of the bed. He has on jeans and a navy sweater over a flannel shirt. He’s been pulling on his socks. His hair is matted at the sides and peaked at the top, like a screwy-looking bird in a Saturday-morning cartoon.
In the dim light I can see his bureau, covered with magazines, loose change, a balled handkerchief, a lone leather glove, and his wallet. In the corner is a chair that functions as a closet. It is piled high this morning with flannel shirts and jeans and a towel. On his bedside table are an alarm clock, a white mug, and a book about the Civil War. Also on the table are a candle in a candleholder and a flashlight. Just in case.
I take a step closer. “Are you okay?” I ask.
“Sure, why?”
“You didn’t come down.”
“I was up late last night.”
My eyes adjust to the gloom, and I notice that my father has little thickets of gray hair over his ears. Is this new?
“Still snowing?” he asks.
“Yup.”
My father stands, massaging his lower back. “I want to keep the path to the woodshed clear in case the power goes out.”
“I’ll do it,” I say.
My father raises an eyebrow. I never of
fer to help with chores I hate. He walks to the window and snaps up the shades. Though the light is still the dull gray of a storm, it reflects off the surface of a small photograph on the bureau. I take a step into the room so that I can see the picture.
It is of Clara, just a year old. It would have been taken shortly before the accident. In the picture she has on a royal blue sweater, but someone, possibly me, has wrapped my father’s navy scarf around her neck and put his ski cap over her head. An uneven fringe of bangs peeks out under the hat, and hair sticks out over her ears as well. Her eyes, unnaturally large, have taken on the color of the sweater. The light from the flash has caught her broad cheeks and nose, and they glow as if with an inner light. Her lower lip glistens pink. She seems delighted with her new getup and is smiling so that her top two teeth are showing. On her right eyebrow is a tiny red scab, the size of a pea.
It is a new photograph, which is to say an old photograph that has recently been put on the bureau. Though I seldom go into my father’s bedroom, I am certain it was not there the night we found the baby.
Something inside me squeezes up tight, like a sponge that is being wrung out.
“She was beautiful,” my father says behind me.
On the morning of Clara’s first birthday, my father took me down to the cellar, where we fitted colored balloons to a tank and filled them with helium that made my father’s voice, when he inhaled it, sound like Donald Duck. We brought the balloons upstairs, where they bounced around the various rooms and settled in clumps, depending upon the drafts. By nightfall they hovered two inches from the ceilings, and by noon the next day they had fallen onto the floors and chairs and behind the television, occasioning an impromptu lecture from my father on the nature of gases and air pressure and gravity. Before the accident my father was famous for his lectures, which he’d deliver in an earnest way, expecting earnest attention in return. Occasionally my mother would roll her eyes and say, with evident fondness, Here we go again, but I enjoyed them, being as I was, for the duration, the hot focus of his attention. Sometimes the lectures were about scientific or historic matters, but often they were moral in nature. I had the You can do it lecture a number of times, usually before a test or a game about which I was anxious. Memorably, I had the Your reputation is priceless lecture after I got invited to my first girl-boy party. And periodically I’d get the Practice makes perfect lecture when I complained about a math worksheet or a piece I was sick of playing on the clarinet. By the time I was nine, I could recite my father’s lectures in my head as he gave them, but I was still enough in awe of him then that I didn’t dare to be disrespectful. I have often wondered what would have happened to us had I reached the teenage years uninterrupted by catastrophe, at what point I’d have tried to convince myself that my father had nothing left to teach me.
The day before, my mother had driven me downtown to pick out a present for my sister. It was the first time I’d ever gone into stores by myself, and I was both excited and nervous. My mother recited a hundred rules and cautions and made me repeat the place and time we would meet three times. I was to buy the present with my own money, ten dollars I had taken from my piggy bank.
I started at a store my parents called the five-and-dime, even though nothing in the store could be purchased for five or ten cents. I wandered the aisles of the toy department, touching dolls and puzzles and board games. The problem with Clara, I decided, was that she couldn’t actually do anything except put blocks together or fit plastic rings onto a cone. I left the store and went into a children’s clothing store next door, where they sold smocked dresses and linen bonnets and where a single pair of socks cost six dollars. I tried the drugstore on the off chance there might be a terrific game in the baby aisle, but when that turned out to be a bust (save for a box of Good and Plenty), I went back to the five-and-dime. As I wandered the aisles, I began to develop the notion that what Clara really needed was a present she could grow into, something that would last and last, a toy that somehow I had missed along the way but that I could play with and then teach her how to use.
I was at the meeting place five minutes ahead of time, and so was my mother.
“What did you get?” she asked.
“Etch A Sketch,” I said.
My mother made a birthday cake in the shape of a train. She let me decorate the separate cars in yellow and green and blue frosting, saving the red for the caboose. The train had a marshmallow smokestack and Life Saver windows and rode on licorice rails along the dining room table. By the time we were done, it looked like a toy, and neither one of us wanted to cut into it after we’d blown out Clara’s single candle.
Clara had awakened that morning with an earache. She alternately shrieked or whined the entire day, fraying my mother’s nerves and causing my father to sigh heavily and repeatedly before the first guest had even arrived. As for me, I thought my baby sister a poor sport, particularly as I was mildly jealous of all the wrapped presents in a corner, one of which I couldn’t wait to get my hands on.
A birthday party for a one-year-old is never for the one-year-old. Clara was oblivious to both the festivity and the domestic angst. The party was for my parents and for me. I had not outgrown the need to be near the present that was being opened, to rip the paper myself in a kind of vicarious frenzy. Clara, immune to the excitement, had so exhausted herself with her fretting that she fell asleep as we sang “Happy Birthday” to her. My mother, reluctant to wake a cranky baby, said we should all carry on without her, an idea I approved of. Most of the photographs taken that day show Clara asleep, a cone-shaped hat on her head, her mouth parted, her nose running. I, in purple leggings and a My Little Pony T-shirt, look anxious and demanding, making sure I get my due. My mother, who that night admitted to having a toothache that later required a root canal, has frown lines between her brows. And in a picture taken by my mother long after all the guests had left, my father is asleep on the couch, crumpled paper wrapping like a small sea around his boat, Clara prone on his chest. In the photograph you can hear him snoring.
I am true to my word. While my father is on the telephone to my grandmother, sorting out her travel arrangements to Lebanon (all her flights have been delayed or canceled), I bundle up in my parka, snow pants, hat, and ski gloves and set out to clear the path to the woodshed for my father. My grandmother’s trip will be a heroic one for a seventy-three-year-old woman, requiring driving herself to the Indianapolis airport, taking a flight from there to Newark, boarding another flight to Boston, waiting for a third flight to Lebanon on a ten-seater plane most twenty-year-olds wouldn’t get on, and then being driven in my father’s truck to Shepherd. Typically the trip will take her, door-to-door, eight hours. She swears that it’s worth it, but I have an idea that soon she won’t be able to make the journey, and that we’ll have to go to Indianapolis instead, a prospect I am looking forward to. To my twelve-year-old eyes, the prospect of three plane flights in one day seems like heaven.
The snow has turned to swirls of fine icy crystals that sting my face if I don’t keep my head lowered. The snow has covered the grasses and the small brush; it spreads in all directions with only the trees to break the panorama. Every pine bough and birch limb is covered with white, as is the woodshed that is my goal. Bushes make humpy shapes, and the forest has lost the spindly scratchiness of early winter. We are socked in. I think of the people who lived in the house when it was built in the late nineteenth century, when there was no town plow to make driveways and roads passable. And of the natives who lived on the land before there were any houses at all, who literally had to dig themselves up through the snow just to reach the air.
The sky seems to be clearing, and I guess that the thin snow shower is a sign of the end of the nor’easter. When the sun comes out, this same landscape will be blinding. Paralleling the drive up to the house is an open field that is long enough to make a sledding hill. Only when we’ve had a good snowfall, though, can I get a decent run without being slowed down by the tops of the
brush. Sometimes I can talk my dad into getting out the round aluminum saucers we use for sleds and helping me pack the snow with a couple of runs himself.
I discover, as I make a few test digs, that the snow is heavy. The temperature is rising and the snow is packing itself. It could take over an hour just to reach the woodshed, and I am beginning to regret my generosity. I hope that when my father gets off the phone with the airlines, he’ll take pity and give me a hand.
I start shoveling in earnest and begin to sweat almost immediately. It takes a tremendous effort to lift a shovelful of snow high enough to overturn it. I shed the scarf and the hat and unzip my parka. After a few minutes I become predictably cold and have to put the clothes back on. I go through three cycles of dressing and undressing and have just about decided I should go in for a cup of hot chocolate when the back door opens.
“Hey,” I hear a voice say.
Charlotte is half in and half out of the door. Her hair, drying, spreads across her shoulders.
“Do you have a hat and mittens I could borrow?” she asks.
“Why?”
“I want to help you shovel.”
I shake my head. “You can’t. You’re . . .” I struggle for the word. Sick isn’t correct. “You’re, you know . . . tired,” I say.
“I’m fine. I need the fresh air.”
My father will be angry if he sees Charlotte outside shoveling the snow with me. Where is he, anyway? “The bench seat flips up,” I say. “We have mittens and hats in there.”
She slips back into the house and emerges a minute later. She takes three long breaths of air, as if she’s been cooped up for days. Maybe she has. She has her jeans tucked into the tops of her boots, which are leather and not at all appropriate for the snow. She has grabbed a pair of old leather gloves my father uses for cross-country skiing and a multicolored hat I made for myself when I was ten. It has mistakes in it and is unraveling at the top.
“Okay,” I say. “You start where I left off. I’ll get the other shovel and begin at the woodshed, and we’ll meet in the center.”