The Ice Storm (16 page)

This strategy turned out to be pretty effective. Sally Miller talked her up. Talked up her transgression, her instigation, her perversion. Her reputation as a slut spread quickly along the corridors of Saxe and across the street to the high school. She could sense at a distance of twenty or thirty lockers the snickering threesomes of popular girls. Now Sally Miller entombed herself in the Saxe library, that resource of the uncool, and even abandoned her Friday elective across the street at the high school, co-ed sports, in order to avoid Wendy Hood. At the same time, Debby Armitage was Wendy's friend for life, and actually Wendy didn't like her that much at all. Debby was a whiner.

So she changed the channel again, turned away from advertisements for the Shroud of Turin (Robert Conrad to host), to watch instead a
Movie of the Week
about a woman who was buried alive by avaricious kidnappers, buried alive and kept that way in a lighted, ventilated box (with one of those gerbil spouts in it, through which she could suck in water and nutrients). Ants swarmed over the woman.

In the midst of this drama, Wendy's brother called.

—Weather reports are bad, he said, like much snow and sleet and frozen highways and byways.

Wendy hadn't heard anything of the kind. But the snow was already falling.

—Well, you think I should come home now? Or should I wait until, you know, the absolutely last train out of Grand Central, which would be like maybe ten after eleven?

She told him
they
were out and that guessing from her dad's condition they weren't gonna wait up for Paul.
They
would fall into bed swiftly and permanently. Which meant no car service, no car service from the station. He could take a taxi. He could come back whenever he wanted.

—The thing is, Wendy said, you're not being watched. Take a cab.

—No one believes in the weather anymore, Paul said.

He asked what she was doing and she described in detail the inside of the woman's buried-alive coffin and her strangled, desperate screams. Wendy even simulated a scream, a little yelp of confinement.

—But you know she's the mother from
Please Don't Eat the Daisies
, Wendy said, or one of those,
Ghost and Mrs. Muir
, so it's not like she's incredibly scary or anything.

—You mean to say you are just gonna hang around the house on a Friday night when
school's out?

—I've got plans, Wendy said.

Abruptly, Paul called her
baby doll
and signed off. It happened all at once. There was a lonesome sound to his farewell, and it reminded her of the way her father would never say good-bye on the phone, the way he hastened to disconnect first.

Wendy wanted to tell Paul she missed him, that she had survived the long, painful stretches of junior high with tales of his good life away from home. Though she had sent him this letter one time, this letter explaining her feelings, she was never sure if it had been received. She thought Paul got all the breaks. He was the smarter one, the badly adapted one. There was no discussion of her being sent away, too. Wendy was a beauty, a pixie, a nymph, a sorceress, but she wasn't going to be any captain of industry. She could work the rooms of the P.T.A. Paul got sent away back at some moment when Valley Road was different, when family life was different, when there was movement between the generations, when there was exchange of sentiment and gifts and ideas and stories. Or that's how Wendy thought sometimes. It was pretty obvious, actually, that no such time had ever existed.

In an interminable commercial break, Wendy gathered up the blanket and set out about the unheated and unlit portions of the house, looking for a sweater she'd left down here somewhere. She surveyed the exposed beams and warped floors, the masonry and wrought-iron latches of historic construction. The house was as cold as a tomb. The ghost of Mark Staples, repressive Episcopal minister and one-time owner of 129 Valley Road, tracked her movements. As Wendy imagined him, he was a
Chiller Theater
ghost, a flapping white sheet, with strings exposed and tennis shoes peaking from beneath. He was so like a Hood—so trapped in indecision, so glum, such a professional bumbler—that he was the perfect ghost for them, the perfect ancestor. She could feel his Halloween exoskeleton girding her. She was creeped out. Forget her sweater. It was lost. She didn't need it.

The decision to head back to the Williamses came soon after this tour. She foolishly settled in to watch first the grasping hand, and then the arm, of the buried woman from
Please Don't Eat the Daisies
struggling up from beneath the surface of her tomb. A team of policemen and paramedics were racing toward the spot where she was buried—they had been tipped off somehow. In the meantime, in the woman's back brain, in the most obscure recesses of cognition, she had effected an escape. Her hands, independent of the rest of her, pushed up through soft earth, grasping.

In a malevolent dusk, the buried woman stood now on a narrow spit of earth, shreds of some Beverly Hills evening gown barely concealing her transparent flesh. Shroud of Turin. What was left of her, as she reached out, covered with shit and pitch and dirt? The trauma had lodged in this woman, Wendy thought, the way a germ lodges in a dead body, to begin its fervent decomposition. The trauma might be wrestled into a repose, at a place like Silver Meadow, but it was never going to disappear.

Wendy had on her poncho and her skintight ski pants before the credits were even rolling. Her imagination had gotten the best of her. She needed a change. Her imagination wheeled around the house like an additional poltergeist. Wendy wanted to read
Nancy Drew
and have training wheels. She wanted deviled ham on white bread or sloppy joes or Twinkies. She wanted a mom who said that soup was good food and who reminded her to chew each bite thirty-two times. She wanted the basic food groups and a program of fitness. She wanted a childhood in which she was a kid.

The storm was in its second phase. Like wage-and-price controls. The methodical roar of the wind leveled out all unusual night sounds. The whole environment, the
ecosystem
, had become this one thing. Wendy felt she was at the center of it as she walked up the driveway, that she was the last girl on earth, that God had selected her and New Canaan as the center of His attention. The trees were doubled over, weary with wind and ice. The snow fell like jagged hunks of glass onto crusty, sheer surfaces. Wendy sank through the rippling, drifting expanses of crystallized stuff halfway to her knees. The crust scored her ankles and calves, drenched through the layers of her socks.

On the main roads, the state of emergency cranked itself up. The mechanized and hydraulic progress of plows and sanding and salting vehicles was somber and methodical. Their lights lingered in the air like the afterglow of bombardment. Wendy could walk in the narrow tracks of these vehicles without coming upon any other fearless traveler. Up the hill, she passed back over the path she had already marked out twice that day. Past Silver Meadow.

She called Mike's name at the Williamses' front door. Called it lustily and desperately. Called it as though she were pronouncing the exact whereabouts of her most secret longitudes. Called it as though if she were alone another minute she would have to be dragged down the road to the hospital and straitjacketed. She beseeched, she argued. No answer came. But the door was open and the front hall invitingly lit. She entered and crept around the house room by room. She was curious like any kid her age. She searched for Mike around the dining room table, in the living room, out on the patio—Mrs. Williams seemed to have given up halfway the process of moving her house-plants in for the winter. She looked for him in the kitchen, and stole a pair of Devil Dogs from the counter. Then she took a spin through the basement, searching in vain for Mike through the intricate architecture of Bazooka crates. The site of that afternoon's disgrace had a bracing and shameful effect.

Then she headed for the stairs.

Mike's trick buzzer greeted her as she reached for his doorknob. It broke the timeless quiet of the house. The hall light was on, but the place was empty. Wendy tried the door again, it buzzed again, and then she just pushed through the noise and opened the door six inches. Mike was turned away in his bed, curled over a pillow as if he had been humping it. Wendy flung back the door and without warning jumped the sleeping figure, flew like a banshee across the room haloed by her blond mane—only to find that it wasn't Mike at all, but some pajamas stuffed with dirty T-shirts and B.V.D.'s and sweat socks. What a joker. He'd pulled that cartoon thing. He'd made a dummy of himself.

The house belonged to her. She held a worn T-shirt to her small, dainty nose and breathed deeply from it. She searched, knowing from Paul where such things were hidden, and found Mike's collection of pornography, in the closet. She even found a ladies' undergarment, still moist with some incriminating glue. At first the sticky lingerie shocked her and she dropped it gingerly to the floor. But then she felt some pity about the necessity of hiding those stolen bras or panties, about the shame and remorse attached to this prop. Choking the chicken, jerking the gherkin, polishing the nightstick, flogging the bishop, spindling your fist: the loneliness and anxiety that had Mike hiding himself away—she felt sad about it right then. Wendy decided to take the garment with her, and shoved it under her shirt, tucking it into the belt line of her powder blue ski pants. It was gross, but she liked it.

And then she went for a peek at the water bed. Mike had showed it to her once before. They had stood on the threshold of the master bedroom like it was one of those roped-off historic homes exhibits—like FDR's house, where they'd had to go on a field trip when she was nine—and watched the water bed. Mike hurried over to disturb its surface. She remembered it was a sunny day in early autumn, and she followed him to the side of the bed to sink her hand into its vinyl blubber. Then they hastily retreated to the doorway and watched it ripple and wave.

Mike was afraid of the master bedroom. The way she was afraid of her own parents' room. The idea of her father sleeping, vulnerable, maybe with one of those nocturnal boners, or in plain fetal position—it disgusted her. She preferred to think of him awake long hours, reading some tome on business or politics. She figured she could take comfort in the notion that her parents never made love. They didn't seem attracted to each other anyway.

But here in the Williamses' house, she was fearless. And since the door to the master bedroom was open, and since she could see that the water bed was unoccupied, she just settled right into it. She was engulfed in its amniotic comfort. It sloshed protoplasmically to one side and then shifted back into the center. She pulled the hand-sewn quilt at the foot of the bed over her—and then kicked it off again. She had smushed the Devil Dogs a little bit in all this activity, but now she opened them up anyway. They would be good whatever their shape.

And then she was interrupted.

—What are you doing?

Sandy Williams. He'd snuck up on her. Sneaking was his passion, so this wasn't a surprise. His tone wasn't outraged or even interested particularly. He just had to ask.

Wendy was startled up to the edge of the bed. She smoothed her poncho down over her lap. For a while she couldn't think how to answer. Then:

—What team is that on your jammies, little Sandy? Her mouth was jammed with Devil Dog. She stood on the hard surface of the floor again, the water stirring uneasily behind her.

—Oakland Raiders. But I don't follow football.

—Hand-me-downs?

Sandy said nothing. Just stood in the doorway. He was really short for his age. In his football pajamas and spectacles, with his cowlick and put-upon expression, he was an odd mixture of an infant and a middle-aged middle-manager. He didn't know where Mike was. His parents were at some party. The exchange of monosyllabic questions was short and unfriendly.

—So what are you doing in here?

—Just taking a look around, Wendy said. What are you doing here? I thought you were over at somebody's house for the night. Like anybody would have you over.

He turned and headed back down the hall. She wasn't thinking. She should have seen the light under his door. She should have known. Maybe there was no light, maybe he planned all his nefarious plans by penlight. Wendy followed, feeling leaden now, defeated, certain that her trespassing would be passed on to the Williamses. Suddenly she was afraid her father would tell them about her and Mike, too. She was caught between a bunch of bad examples of truancy. It was closing in on her. And she was only fourteen.—Sandy, she said, lemme see some of your models. C'mon, wait, what's going on?

He squinted at her from down the hall. His glasses were never strong enough. He wore a little clip-on sun-filter attachment on them these days, like a big-league outfielder. He padded around the banister and into his room without a reply. But he left the door open.

In the guest room, on the way by: rumpled bedding.

On his bed, beside him, Sandy had a G. I. Joe with Lifelike Hair, the newer model with the hippie grooming, the facial hair. There was a little scar on Joe's cheek, a vermilion, plastic scar. And he talked, too, when you pulled his dog tag. Sandy was quick to point out that his particular G. I. Joe, however, was malfunctioning. Joe had only one thing to say, no matter how many times you pulled the dog tag:

—Mayday! Mayday! Get this message back to base!

In his orange jumpsuit, Joe looked really comfortable, not at all like a P.O.W. or M.I.A. on the run. But Sandy had some grim plans for him. As Wendy looked on, Sandy was calmly tying a noose for his doll. He pulled the dog tag again.

—Back to base!

—Sometimes, Sandy said, he doesn't even make it all the way through.

—Mayday! Mayday! Joe said. Get this message back to base! Back to base! Back to base!