The Early Stories (77 page)

A sudden rectangle of light was flung from the shadows of the porch. Becky came out into the cold with him. She was carrying a lawn rake.

He asked her, “Should you be out again? How's your frostbite?” Though she was a distance away, there was no need, in the immaculate air, to raise his voice.

“It's O.K. It kind of tingles. And under my chin. Mommy made me put on a scarf.”

“What's the lawn rake for?”

“It's a way you can make a path. It really works.”

“O.K., you make a path to the garage, and after I get my breath I'll see if I can get the Jeep back in.”

“Are you having asthma?”

“A little.”

“We were reading about it in biology. Dad, see, it's kind of a tree inside
you, and every branch has a little ring of muscle around it, and they tighten.” From her gestures in the dark she was demonstrating, with mittens on.

What she described, of course, was classic unalloyed asthma, whereas his was shading into emphysema, which could only worsen. But he liked being lectured to—preferred it, indeed, to lecturing—and as the minutes of companionable silence with his daughter passed he took inward notes on the bright, quick impressions flowing over him like a continuous voice. The silent cold. The stars. Orion behind an elm. Minute scintillae in the snow at his feet. His daughter's strange black bulk against the white; the solid grace that had stolen upon her over time. He remembered his father shovelling their car free from a sudden unwelcome storm in the mid-Atlantic region. The undercurrent of desperation, his father a salesman and must get to Camden. Got to get to Camden, boy, get to Camden or bust. Dead of a heart attack at forty-seven.

Ethan tossed a shovelful into the air so the scintillae flashed in the steady golden chord from the house windows. He saw again Elaine and Matt sitting flushed at the lodge table, parkas off, in deshabille, as if sitting up in bed. Matt's enviable way of turning a half-circle on the top of a mogul, light as a diver, compared with the cancerous unwieldiness of Ethan's own skis. The callousness of students. The flawless cruelty of the stars, Orion intertwined with the silhouetted elm. A black tree inside him. His daughter, busily sweeping with the rake, childish yet lithe, so curiously demonstrating this preference for his company. It was female of her, he supposed, to forgive him her frostbite. A plow a half-mile away painstakingly scraped. He was missing the point of this silent lecture. The point was unstated: an absence. He was looking upon his daughter as a woman, but without lust. There was no need to possess her; she was already his. The music around him was being produced, in the zero air, like a finger on a glass rim, by this hollowness, this biological negation.
Sans
lust,
sans
jealousy. Space seemed love, bestowed to be free in, and coldness the price. He felt joined to the great dead whose words it was his duty to teach.

The Jeep came up unprotestingly from the fluffy snow. It looked happy to be penned in the garage with Elaine's station wagon, and the skis, and the oiled chain saw, and the power mower dreamlessly waiting for spring. Ethan was so full of happiness that, rather than his soul shatter, he uttered a sound: “Becky?”

“Yeah?”

“You want to know what else Mr. Langley said?”

“What?” They trudged toward the porch, up the path the gentle rake had cleared.

“He said you ski better than the boys.”

“I bet,” she said, and raced to the porch, and in the precipitate way, evasive and pleased, that she flung herself to the top step he glimpsed something generic and joyous, a pageant that would leave him behind.

The Rescue
 

Helplessly Caroline Harris, her husband and son having seized the first chair, found herself paired with Alice Smith. Together they were struck in the backs of their knees and hurled upward. When Caroline had been a child, her father, conceited in his strength, would toss her toward the ceiling with the same brutal, swooping lurch.

Alice snapped the safety bar, and they were bracketed together. It was degrading for both of them. Up ahead, neither Norman nor Timmy deigned to glance back. From the rear, hooded and armed with spears, they were two of a kind, Timmy at twelve only slightly smaller than his father; and this, too, she felt as a desertion, a flight from her body. While she was dragged through the air, rudely joggled at each pier, the whiteness of the snow pressed on the underside of her consciousness with the gathering insistence of a headache. Her ski boots weighed; her feet felt captive. Rigid with irritation and a desire not to sway, she smoked her next-to-last cigarette, which was cheated of taste by the cold, and tried to decide if the woman beside her were sleeping with Norman or not.

This morning, as they drove north into New Hampshire, there had been in the automobile an excessive ease, as if the four of them knew each other better than Caroline remembered reason for. There had been, between Alice Smith and Norman, a lack of flirtation a shade too resolute, while on sleepy, innocent Timmy the woman had inflicted a curiously fervent playfulness, as if warm messages for the father were being forwarded through the son, or as if Alice were seeking to establish herself as a sexual nonentity, a brotherly sister. Caroline felt an ominous tug in this trip. Had she merely imagined, during their fumbling breakfast at Howard Johnson, a poignance in the pauses, and a stir of something, like toes touching, under the table? And was she paranoid to have suspected a
deliberate design in the pattern of alternation that had her and her son floundering up the T-bar together as the other two expertly skimmed down the slope and waited, side by side, laughing vapor, at the end of the long and devious line? Caroline was not reassured, when they all rejoined at lunch, by Alice's smile, faintly flavored with a sweetness unspecified in the recipe.

Alice had been her friend first. She had moved to their neighborhood a year ago, a touching little divorcée with pre-school twins, utterly lost. Her only interest seemed to be sports, and her marital grief had given her an awkward hardness, as if from too much exercise. Norman had called her pathetic and sexless. Yet a winter later he had rescued his skis from a decade in the attic, enrolled Timmy in local lessons, and somehow guided his wife in the same dangerous direction, as irresistibly as this cable was pulling them skyward.

They were giddily lifted above the tops of the pines. Caroline, to brace her voice against her rising fear, spoke aloud: “This is ridiculous. At my age women in Tahiti are grandmothers.”

Alice said seriously, “I think you do terribly well. You're a natural dancer, and it shows.”

Caroline could not hate her. She was as helpless as herself, and there was some timid loyalty, perhaps, in Norman's betraying her with a woman she had befriended. She felt, indeed, less betrayed than diluted, and, turning with her cigarette cupped against the wind, she squinted at the other woman as if into an unkind mirror. Alice was small-boned yet coarse; muscularity, reaching upward through the prominent tendons of her throat, gave her face, even through the flush of windburn, a taut, sallow tinge. Her hair, secured by a scarlet ear warmer, was abundant but mousy, and her eyes were close-set, hazel, and vaguely, stubbornly inward. But between her insignificant nose and receding chin there lay, as if in ambush, a large, complicated, and (Caroline supposed) passionate mouth. This, she realized, as the chair swayed sickeningly, was exactly what Norman would want: a mouse with a mouth.

Disgust, disgust and anger, swung through her. How greedy men were! How conceited and brutish! The sky enlarged around her, as if to receive so immense a condemnation. With deft haste Alice undid the safety bar; Caroline involuntarily transposed the action into an undoing of Norman's clothes. Icy with contempt for her situation, she floated onto the unloading platform and discovered, slipping down the alarming little ramp, that her knees were trembling and had forgotten how to bend.

Of course, they were abandoned. The males had heedlessly gone ahead, and beckoned, tiny and black, from the end of a tunnel tigerishly striped with the shadows of birches. On whispering skis held effortlessly parallel, Alice led, while Caroline followed, struggling clumsily against the impulse to stem. They arrived where the men had been and found them gone again. In their place was a post with two signs. One pointed right to
GREASED LIGHTNING (EXPERT)
. The other pointed left to
THE LIGHTNING BUG (INTERMEDIATE-NOVICE)
.

“I see them,” Alice said, and lightly poled off to the right.

“Wait,” Caroline begged.

Alice christied to a stop. A long lavender shadow from a mass of pines covered her and for a painful instant, as her lithe body inquisitively straightened, she seemed beautiful.

“How expert is it?” The Harrises had never been to this mountain before; Alice had been several times.

“There's one mogully piece you can sideslip,” Alice said. “The Bug will take you around the other side of the mountain. You'll never catch the men.”

“Why don't you follow them and I'll go down the novice trail? I don't trust this mountain yet.” It was a strange mountain, one of the lesser Presidentials, rather recently developed, with an unvarnished cafeteria and very young boys patrolling the trails in rawly bright jackets chevron-striped in yellow and green. At lunch, Norman said he twice had seen members of the ski patrol take spills. His harsh laugh, remembered at this bare altitude, frightened her. The trembling in her knees would not subside, and her fingertips were stinging in their mittens.

Alice crisply sidestepped back up to her. “Let's both go down the Bug,” she said. “You shouldn't ski alone.”

“I don't want to be a sissy,” Caroline said, and these careless words apparently triggered some inward chain of reflection in the other woman, for Alice's face clouded, and it appeared certain that she was sleeping with Norman. Everything, every tilt of circumstance, every smothered swell and deliberate contraindication, confirmed it, even the girl's name, Smith—a nothing-name, a demimondaine's alias. Her hazel eyes, careful in the glare of the snow, flickeringly searched Caroline's and her expressive mouth froze on the verge of a crucial question.

“Track! Track!”

The voice was behind them, shrill and young. A teen-age girl, wearing a polka-dot purple parka, and her mother, a woman almost elderly, who
seemed to have rouged the tip of her nose, turned beside them and casually plunged over the lip of Greased Lightning.

Caroline, shamed, said, “The hell with it. The worst I can do is get killed.” Murderously stabbing the snow next to Alice's noncommital buckle-boots, she pushed off to the right, her weight flung wildly back, her uphill ski snagging, her whole body burning with the confirmation of her suspicions. She would leave Norman. Unsteady as a flame she flickered down the height, wavering in her own wind. Alice carefully passed her and, taking long traverses and diagrammatically deliberate turns, seemed to be inviting her not to destroy herself. Submitting to the sight, permitting her eyes to infect her body with Alice's rhythm, she found the snow yielding to her as if under the pressure of reason; and, swooping in complementary zigzags, the two women descended a long white waterfall linked as if by love.

Then there was a lazy flat run in the shadow of reddish rocks bearded with icicles, then another descent, through cataracts of moguls, into a wider, elbow-shaped slope overlooking, from the height of a mile, a toy lodge, a tessellated parking lot, and, vast and dim as a foreign nation, a frozen lake mottled with cloud shadows and islands of evergreen. Tensely sideslipping, Caroline saw, on the edge of this slope, at one side of the track, some trouble, a heap of dark cloth. In her haste to be with the men, Alice would have swept by, but Caroline snowplowed to a halt. With a dancing waggle Alice swerved and pulled even. The heap of cloth was the woman with the red-tipped nose, who lay on her back, her head downhill. Her daughter knelt beside her. The woman's throat was curved as if she were gargling, and her hood was submerged in snow, so that her face showed like a face in a casket.