The Ice Storm (28 page)

And when Mr. Williams and Sandy ventured into the kitchen, Mike was on their minds. The fire wasn't going very well, and the two men squatted down beside her to advise on the subject. It was their job, right? To advise? Mr. Williams used the fire iron to nudge Wendy's Duraflame log around a little bit. Sandy manned the bellows.

—Wendy, Mr. Williams said calmly, as he poked the fire, you didn't see Mike last night, did you?

She told him how she had been at home watching the film about the buried woman. By the time she got over to their house, Mike was already gone. The words hurt, coming out of her mouth. All words hurt. They tasted corrosive.

—Sandy said he was at Silver Meadow, she said, but then maybe I might have seen him there on the way by. Or maybe not. I might have seen him if he was out on the hill sledding or just running around or something.

—But he also said he might go down to see Danny Spofford, Sandy said.

Jim Williams placed one hand on his son's head, and one on Wendy's. He stood.

—Keep your hands off each other while I make this phone call, okay? You two monsters—

And he was smiling as he picked up the phone by the upright piano—sheet music on the stand for
Moon River
. But when he realized that the phone lines were down, too, his countenance changed. Out in the kitchen, suddenly, Wendy could hear him talking it over with her mother.

—You don't think that Janey picked him up somewhere, do you?

—He's probably fine, Elena said. He's probably down at our house having sausages with Ben.

—The phone's dead.

—I don't think you should overdo this.

The house was still for a moment. The fire consumed its fodder.

Then Mr. Williams said:

—Okay, you two, c'mon in here, because the time has come for a little discussion.

Wendy and Sandy were warm in one another's company. In front of the fire. Not talking, not feeling comfortable even, just there. Not knowing what had happened with the vodka the night before, unsure of how it got them here. Silenced by the power of the vodka to take events and reshape them somehow, to make them wild. Wendy didn't feel like she knew Sandy exactly, but there was something she shared with him now. He offered her the bellows and she squirted a tentative stream of air on the artificial log in the fireplace. Sandy picked up the fire iron and stabbed the log savagely. A shower of blue, green, and red sparks exploded from it. Wendy choked, trying to swallow again. The lye was in her now. Traveling in her bloodstream, clogging her liver.

The two of them padded into the kitchen, where Elena Hood arranged strips of bacon on a large skillet, broke eggs into a mixing bowl, searched for her miracle ingredient, paprika. These culinary efforts belied her shock, the blank, numb look she had, a look Wendy understood clearly, but that was lost on the Williamses. Still, Elena had reached some sort of an agreement with Jim Williams, somewhere along the line—this was obvious, in the way they gingerly circled around each other in the kitchen, in circles along the linoleum, not lovingly, exactly, but respectfully. Honoring each other just a little. Some kind of impermanent appreciation, which didn't admit all the ups and downs but was heady for a brief moment. The result of this appreciation was going to be a joint lecture. Mr. Williams pointed to the the breakfast table. Sandy and Wendy sat.

—Okay. Uh, everybody comfortable? Williams stood, right at the edge of the parquet in the alcove, with his arms folded. All right. Now, this isn't an easy thing we have to talk about this morning but I think we have to talk about it anyway, and that's why it is that your mother, Wendy, stayed here last night and not at your house.… She stayed here with me last night. That's, uh, the first thing we have to tell you. And although the reason she stayed was primarily the electricity and the fact that we had to, uh, abandon the car in a ditch up on Ferris Hill Road, it would be dishonest if I didn't tell you that we did spend the night together … in the … on the water bed. I have to be clear about this, kids. Now, sometimes as a marriage gets familiar it starts to age a little bit—this happens sometimes. It just happens that the people who are married—like your mother and I, Sandy, or Benjamin and Elena—get to a point where they want a little something in their marriage. They get to a point when they find themselves, uh, straying away. Look, it's not that complicated. It's sort of the way you might want A.1. sauce on your burger one week and mustard the next. It's that simple. Or the way you might want to go to a McDonald's one Saturday and to the Darien Pizza Restaurant the next time. Marriage contracts, yeah, that's right. It gets smaller. It's hard to get back to that place of just liking each other, or else you love one another, your love is strong, but you just don't care for one another in the way you did. And society teaches us right now that this isn't necessarily a bad thing to want—to want some spice. It's an okay thing. It's a little far out, it shakes some people up, but it's okay. Your mother and I and probably Mrs. and Mr. Hood, too, well, we grew up at a time when, no matter what kinds of desires you were experiencing in your marriage, it was considered wrong to violate these vows that you took at the altar. What happened because of this was that our parents and their parents were angry … angry and ticked off at each other for just wanting a little variety. They were yelling at each other and sleeping in separate bedrooms and ignoring their kids—ignoring us, because we were the kids then!—while they were battling against each other—
battling
—for the right to have these desires. These weird little infatuations. That's right.

Elena's eggs, their aroma, filled the kitchen now, and lent it concord and harmony it didn't exactly have. Mr. Williams was getting nervous as he traveled down the rich, salesmanlike path of his reasoning. Wendy's poisonous mouth stung. She hung her head.

—So now we can do this if we want. We can bend these bonds a little bit; we can borrow somebody else for a night and not have it … without endangering our families or anything. Borrow out of affection, right? Not callously, but the way you would call on a friend to share something. That's it, just sharing. And that's what I want to say to you kids. You can wake up one morning like this, when everything outside is so pretty, and you can wake up to something confusing like finding your mother away from home and someone else—your friend's mother, say—in her place. The car's missing, you figure out it's totaled someplace. But I want you to understand, bub (and Williams was sitting at the table now and leaning out over his designer place mats to look his son right in the eyes), that this doesn't have any effect on our family. I'm here in this house. I will always be here in this house. And your mother and I may have our patches of white water, but we're still together. We're in this house together, electricity or no electricity. And we want to be together, to help you kids and to help each other.

—Now, your mother, Williams went on, your mother … left the party with someone else. I want to be honest about this. I have to be straight with you. Okay? And so we can figure out what kind of situation she's in. She has taken advantage of this opportunity that same way we have. She might be happy about it, she might not. We don't know. But she can't call now, because the phone lines don't work and probably there are trees down along the roads. The electricity is out, and the roads are dangerous. And that's why she's not back yet. But when she gets back and when Mike gets back we will all sit down, Sandy, and probably Wendy you can count on sitting down in your house, too, with your dad, and have a long conversation about what's happened.

Elena sat at the table next to Wendy. She passed around the plates. To Wendy, the eggs tasted bland and cold. They tasted like blue soap. Sandy was shoving eggs into his mouth without passion or joy.

—There's one last thing we have to go into here, Jim Williams added, and that's the matter of you kids staying together last night. Now, I guess I don't have to give you two a brushing-up on the birds and the bees. (Here Williams laughed a deep and hearty belly laugh that nonetheless sounded phony.) I mean, I guess I don't have to explain to you about sexual intercourse. I will say, though, that this is a very serious business. I'm not sure in your case, bub, that you're quite ready to handle it—I mean, when you've got a few dark hairs on your upper lip we can get down to some real conversation on the subject. Then I'll teach you how to take this matter into your own hands, but until then, firstly, you guys aren't ready and so you should confine yourselves to less, uh, invasive kinds of investigation, and secondly, if something miraculous were going to happen … say you were suddenly able to conceive—you would be in a very difficult place. Right? This is serious. Imagine, Sandy, if Wendy were to get pregnant right now, when you are thirteen and she is—what? Thirteen, too? Imagine what Wendy would have to go through over at the high school in her maternity gowns, trying to cover up the fact. And then how would you two take care of the baby once you had it? Who's going to take care of it while you are at school? Who's going to pay for the obstetrical care or the delivery of the child? Do you expect us to carry the expenses you two incur through stupidity? Hell, no! And who's going to teach this kid the morals it needs to have? Its morality is already a little sloppy based on the job you're doing now. Get it? You two aren't even done learning morals yourselves and already you want the responsibility of taking on a kid? And add to this the fact that you don't know how you feel about each other, because there are other … extenuating relationships going on around here. You don't even know what you think exactly.… Well, obviously, there's some kind of contagious quality to behavior like this. You guys didn't get an idea this far out just by yourselves, that's what I think. So you must have gotten it somewhere. That's something to think about, whether you were reading one of our books and you found references to behavior like this, or what. We'd be happy to discuss this with you, rather than leave you to get all your information from books. Just bring the book down here with you, Sandy, bring the book to me,
The Godfather
, page whatever, that one Mike likes to read. We can go over the hard words. Look, making choices is an important thing for young people. So that's what I'd like to offer you guys … choices. Until you have all the facts, until you know, when you're getting into bed, how the other half lives, it's just not a good idea. That's what I'm saying to you, and if it's not a good idea, you should put it off. Put it off, okay? Get it, kids?

Wendy had been staring at her plate, watching the eggs sink into a lukewarm and clotted state, stirring up the arrangement of toast and jam and eggs. It was safe to look up again.

—Elena, do you have anything to add?

Elena shook her head drastically.

—No, no. Wendy and I will take this up on the way back to the house.

So that was the end of it. Whatever stray impulse had led Wendy's mother into the Williamses' house—and it had been passed along to Wendy in full, just as the volatility of the O'Malleys had been passed along to her—whatever the impulse was that had led her mother from the party onto the water bed, where she had swam in Jim Williams's arms, whatever revolution had taken place in her mother, it had been succeeded by a harsh return to her old constitution. That was the way of things with adults—they trailed after ecstasy and then denied it, rationalized it, dressed it all up in talk. Her mother regretted being there, in that kitchen, regretted having cooked the breakfast, regretted even having hurt Benjamin, however justified this hurt might have been. Her mother regretted everything now. Wendy could see this regret playing across her face.

—Hey, bub, Jim Williams said, your shortwave radio have any batteries in it? Think we can get news radio or something on there?

Sandy nodded halfheartedly.

And the two of them rose together and in synchronous, almost choreographed movements, they wiped their mouths with the cloth napkins Elena had set on the table, set these napkins across their plates, and left the plates behind.

And then Wendy thought about the complications of the whole night. What if there was a sort of swap with the neighbors and it exceeded everybody's expectation? Just to start with, Wendy was going to be sealed into a town where everyone knew her mother slept with the man up the street. This knowledge would circulate like her own dalliance with Debby Armitage. Then, take it a little further, go a little further down that road, she might be stepsister with the boy she loved, and stepsister, also, with his rival, whom she had also once loved. She would commit incest with a stepsibling. She would permit each of her stepbrothers to touch her. She would dry hump them together, maybe. Then her stepbrothers would fight to the death for the right to seed in her a two-headed baby who spoke Greek at birth and knew the date of Jesus' next appearance. Her father and stepfather would not speak to one another. Her mother and stepmother would not speak to one another. She would be enjoined, when in the company of her father and Mrs. Williams, against speaking about her mother and Mr. Williams. Or: she would never see Mikey and Sandy, because they would have opposite weekends of visitation. Or: they would split up visitation, one week with Sandy, one week with Mikey, and she would swap them, as her parents had swapped one another. Or: she would return home with the Hoods and this whole weekend would remain a horrible episode no one ever talked about, which left in its wake the moral carnage of a whole town full of kids.

—We should get going, her mother said. Let's finish this up and you can get your things. I'll borrow some boots.…

—We have to walk?

—The Williamses' car is back up on Ferris Hill and your father has the Firebird.

The silence between Wendy and Elena was long and durable. Almost unbreachable.