The Melting Season (2 page)

Then I took a shower for the first time in a week. All I had been doing was sitting around being mad at the world. There had been a lot going on, but it had all been in my head. A shower had not occurred to me the entire time.

The hot water ran out quickly. The radiator near the window banged and moaned. The windows steamed up. It reminded me of nothing in particular but still it felt familiar. I wiped the steam off the mirror with the towel and stared at myself. My hair in damp tangles all over my shoulders, the pink puffed-out rims of my eyes, a jag of tiny red pimples across my nose.

I needed sleep.

The comforter on the bed was brown and there were tiny cartoon trains all over it. It itched my skin when I slid underneath it. I put my head down and slept for an hour. When I woke my hair was dry and clean. I felt rested. I still had the same feeling as when I was driving, that something was going to happen, but now it could go either way. I thought about playing hide-and-seek with my sister, Jenny, when we were still kids, her barely reading her storybooks by herself, me on the verge of being a teenager. I would always hide from her. This was how I babysat. Nothing too fancy. I hid, she ran around the house yelling my name. Boy, could she hustle. But she loved it, it was her favorite game to play, and I guess I did not mind it that much either. I remember sitting in the closet, her about to open the door. I never knew what I was going to do. I could pounce or I could scream or I could jump in the air and laugh. But something had to happen next.

I put on a few layers of clothes. I missed my summertime tan, and my short skirts, and how happy and free the air on my skin made me feel. I brushed my hair. It was blond and thick and spread out over my shoulders and down my back to my waist. My crown of glory, just as it had been for years. I looked at myself in the mirror. I was thinner, like a scrawny child now, tiny bones, my flesh lost to stress and misery. But I had the same face, and my beloved hair. I still looked like me. Only I was not Moonie Madison anymore.

I had been Moonie since high school. When Thomas first fell in love with me, he named me that. I was his moon, and he was my stars, that is the way it was right from the beginning. Just like that I was Moonie. No one else. During our wedding Thomas even said, “I take you, Moonie—I mean Catherine,” and everyone laughed. But it was all true. I did not even remember who I was before I met him.

And now I was not Moonie anymore. Catherine did not feel too right either. I had already stopped being Catherine. I was going to have to sort out a whole new me.

I left the room and locked the door behind me. The door next to mine cracked open, and I saw a woman watching me. I thought maybe she was like me for a second, traveling alone. But then the door swung open and a little boy came running out. He was a toddler, wearing just diapers on his bottom half and a sweater on top. The woman plucked him up and clutched him to her chest. I could not decide how old she was. Everything about her looked the same as me, except for her forehead. There were lines carved into it like rivers in the earth. I wondered what it would feel like, to rub my hands along those lines. This is how we are different, I thought. I am still smooth, and you are lined. I wondered if she hated having them, or even if she noticed them at all. I wondered if that little boy was why she had those lines, if the love she felt for him was so strong and deep that her face had changed forever. She smiled at me, and then the baby started crying, and she closed the door.

I went to the bar. I could not remember ever going to a bar by myself. That seemed like a thing a girl who was looking for trouble would do, and I had never once looked for trouble in my life. The bar was full of men, a few guys younger than me, but most of them were in their forties or older. In the back I saw a couple of women with their husbands, and there was a little girl running around who had sparkly barrettes crooked in her hair. I was sure that everyone knew everyone else. Most people were smoking. In certain parts of the bar the air was so thick with it you could not see people’s faces clearly. I did not want to eat there, but I was starving.

I sat at the bar. The stool had a tear in it. The men to the right of me were laughing and seemed harmless enough. They were not any different from the men who came into the diner back home, men who had known me since I was a kid. My father did not take me into bars when I was growing up, but he was not the kind to go out and socialize. Working all day at the pharmacy was enough people time for him. He was not a snob, though, and he did not raise one either. I sat down and ordered a Southern Comfort and Diet Coke from the bartender, a short woman with breasts so big it was like there was no stomach left. They just took over everything. Her lipstick stained the skin around her mouth where age was fading her. She had the same eyes as the girl who had checked me in at the motel. She could be complaining one minute, she could make you laugh the next. You just didn’t know what you would get from her.

I turned around on my stool and faced the room. Most people nodded at me; a few smiled. I smiled back. I watched as a young guy with sloppy lips made his way around the room. Every few minutes, he would lean in too close to someone and yell, “Head butt.” Then he would do just that, slam his head against someone else’s. There would be this loud crack, and people would turn and stare, then go back to their talking. This was his thing, I guessed.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart, he won’t do it to you,” said the man next to me. He had long feathery hair that was brittle on the edges. He wore a leather vest and his skin was pitted and rotting, but he had a nice light in his eyes. I liked looking at him. “He only does it to people he knows. Especially he’s not going to do it to a girl like you.” He blew smoke from his cigarette away from my face. “You just passing through or you’re staying awhile or . . .”

“I just came to get some food,” I said. “It’s been a long day of driving.”

“Oh yeah? Where you headed?”

“West,” I said. And then I added, “Los Angeles,” because it was as far west as I could think to go. It sounded like a place you moved to when you needed to start over. It was a lie, but there was no way I could tell the truth. And maybe it could become the truth. There were a lot of options. The world was wide open in front of me. I would have to trust myself to find the way.

The man introduced himself. His name was Arnold. He and I talked about the roads for a little while. He and his son, Pete, had just come back from Denver, visiting Arnold’s ex-wife and Pete’s mother. They rode their motorcycles, and things had been rough with the snow. He told me to just keep heading west, to take 80 through Salt Lake City and head down to Vegas. If I kept the pedal to the metal, I could make it there in a day. Pete came over and introduced himself to me. He was tall and his face had not been ruined by drink yet. His hair was tied back in a ponytail and he had long sideburns. He was rough-looking, for sure, but I did not mind talking to him. I had spent so many years with Thomas, who could be so weepy and sensitive, that it was nice to talk to men who did not look like they had ever cried.

Arnold and Pete took turns buying me SoCo and Diet Cokes. The drinks tasted like syrup, and I took big gulps of them like medicine. They treated me like I was really interesting, but in fact they were doing most of the talking. There was nothing I could tell them about anyway without getting myself in trouble.

Arnold started in on this story about how his ex-wife had left him and Pete years ago, when Pete was still a baby, but how they were all still close. Arnold was part Arapaho, and when he and his wife, Trinie, were married they moved onto a reservation nearby. Trinie had been a dance student in Colorado and had dreamed of moving to New York, but had gotten pregnant with Pete almost immediately after she met Arnold. Neither one of them could afford much. Trinie’s parents had kicked her out of the house when they found out she was pregnant with some half-breed’s kid, and all Arnold’s folks could do was find them a small farmhouse deep in the woods of the reservation that they could rent for cheap. It was three miles to the main road, and Arnold rode his Harley into work as a day laborer and left Trinie there alone to take care of little Pete. Once every few weeks Arnold’s mother would drive Trinie into town to buy groceries in her pickup truck, but mostly Trinie was alone all day long, just her and the baby.

At first she liked it: she had a vegetable garden, and she learned to chop wood. “She was becoming one with the earth,” said Arnold. She used to put on little dance performances in the trees for Arnold and baby Pete. But eventually the isolation began to drive her nuts.

I thought about me and Thomas out on our farm, with no one to talk to but each other, even with all those construction workers hammering in the background. They were building us our brand-new dream farmhouse, even though I was just fine with the way it was. He said it was necessary. He said we deserved it. He said he wanted to treat me right. So I let Thomas run the show, and I stayed away from all the renovation business. And once he started fixing things up, he could not stop. Soon enough he was making changes to himself, but by then it was too late for me to stop him. I let him be in charge, until I could not stand it anymore.

“I bet she went crazy out there,” I said.

“Crazy’s a word I’d use,” he said.

She begged Arnold to move but he would not listen. He liked the quiet, dark woods, and coming home to his wife and child in his cozy cabin. It felt safe and nice to him. He was not hearing a thing she said. Trinie let her dark hair grow long and it fell below her waist. She started to stage small acts of defiance. She cooked meat only halfway through for dinner sometimes, at least the meat she served to her husband, and she taught her child new and unusual curses to say to his father, as if he were the parrot of a salty old fisherman.

Arnold shook his head and laughed when he told me that last part, and there was a forgiving glint in his eye. It probably took her forever to get him going, I thought. He would have let her keep torturing him till the end. Pete got up to get me another drink. I was getting good and drunk. I realized I had forgotten to eat but I was not hungry anymore. Arnold said something to me about how his house was nicer than any old hotel, and if I wanted I could come out and stay with the two of them. Off in the corner there was another crack of one head against another, and then somebody started yelling. Pete came back and handed me a drink, then put his hand around my neck and rubbed the muscles there until they were warm. It had been a while since someone had touched me like that and I was enjoying it a little bit. Arnold watched Pete rubbing me for a minute. His face did not change at all. Then he motioned for me to move in closer to him, and I did, and Pete’s hand dropped away.

“The last straw—for Trinie, not for me, I would have let her stay forever no matter what she did to me, I mean she’s my wife and the mother of my son, come on—was the blizzard of ... was it ’83? Could it have been that long?” Arnold paused and scratched his chin, and did some thinking. In the corner a man lost another game of pool and threw his cue on the table. I realized everyone around me was drunk, too. It was getting late. The families had packed up their kids and left by then, and the only other woman left was the bartender.

“I think it was ’83,” said Pete. He slipped his hand around my waist. “You sure you want to stay in that hotel tonight?” he said in my ear. I did not answer him.

The blizzard came and it was a whiteout for days. There was no work to be found so Arnold and Trinie were trapped in the house with little Pete. It was cold and they were running out of wood so they used it sparingly. No one wanted to go outside in that weather and chop. And that one extra person around all the time made the house feel even smaller to Trinie. Plus Arnold was bored. He went through a few fifths of whiskey a day. They started yelling and fighting and no one could hear her scream. “She kept screaming,” said Arnold. “Hoping someone would come and save her or pull her out of there, and the more she screamed the more she realized she was in the middle of nowhere. Then she got it in her head that if no one could hear her scream, no one would hear
me
scream. She decided to test that little theory of hers out.”

Next to me Pete nodded twice, and left his head down.

Trinie went after Arnold with an ax one morning. He woke up just as she lowered it and he rolled off to the side and onto the floor. The ax went through the bed. Pete saw the whole thing.

“I don’t remember much but I remember that,” said Pete.

“After that we sent her back to Colorado to stay with her parents. They were ready to have her back, as long as I stayed away.” Arnold started laughing. “And believe me, at the time I thought: you can keep her.”

A fight started in the corner by the pool table. Men tumbled over each other like children and then they were both shoved outside and the whole bar emptied to watch them. We all carried our drinks with us. I slipped a little bit on a patch of ice and Pete caught me. The snow was falling lighter and the sky was finally dark. There were grunts and punches and people casually stared. No one wanted it to get too crazy, but no one wanted it to stop either. It was a snowstorm, there wasn’t much else to do but drink and fight. There was blood on the snow and one man finally passed out. We all shuffled back in the bar.

“I saw that she was right, of course, but by then it was too late,” said Arnold.

“We got a new house down the road from here,” said Pete. “Right in the middle of it all.”

“I have to go home,” I said.

“We’ll walk you back to your room,” said Arnold.

“It is okay,” I said. “I am fine.”

“We can’t have you slipping and falling in the snow,” said Arnold. “Come on, Pete, give her a hand.” Pete put his hand under my elbow. We made our way back toward my room. My eyes were closing down on my face. Arnold was saying something to me; I could hear him through my eyes.