The Time of Her Life (6 page)

They turned on the radio and found out that all the town was frozen. When they listened to the explanation that a freakish
Canadian air mass had settled over the region, Avery thought it was very likely that he could see it accurately in his imagination.
Heavy and dark and silent, slipping in low over the gentle hills of southern Missouri, displacing the warmer, friendly, humid
air in just the way a cold despondency closed in on him and unsettled the pleased good humor induced by a drink or two. He
never expected it, was never prepared.

The moisture in the upper air had condensed into rain which froze on its way to earth, and the ice had accumulated so quickly
that cars were frozen in place, and city equipment couldn’t move. The announcer read out long lists of cancellations and warnings.
Walking was hazardous; driving was impossible, and people would have to make do with whatever supplies they had on hand.

Maggie phoned while they were sitting in the kitchen, and she assured Claudia that Jane could stay—must stay—until the ice
could be navigated. She was crisp and chipper, unlike any grown-up Claudia had ever known as a child. Maggie was admirably
adult and sure, so Claudia stifled the sudden pang of longing she had for her daughter to be here, at home with her while
Avery took his leave.

“Is Jane all right? Can she borrow some things from Diana?” Claudia said.

There was a brief pause on the other end of the phone, and Claudia instinctively turned and curled the cord halfway around
herself in an attitude of self-protection.

“The thing is,” Maggie said, with the efficient sound she made of defining her G’s at the end of a word in a little drawl,
“are you both all right? I meant to call you yesterday. I should have noticed that Avery had had so much to drink. I should
have served coffee.” She didn’t say any more. Maggie took the blame upon herself; she could be counted on for discretion.
Even so, Claudia didn’t like it much, to be asked anything about herself; she didn’t confide in anyone but her daughter and
her husband. She didn’t have Avery’s knack of camaraderie.

“We’re fine. We have milk and eggs and plenty of food,” she answered, and she was met with another brief pause before she
got a reply. It was clear that in some way she had insulted Maggie with her reticence, and they hung up on a brisk note: Jane
would spend the night again at the Tunbridges’, and they would get in touch in the morning.

For the next four days Lunsbury was frozen inside its buildings. The wind had stripped the trees of their heavy leaves, and
it blew in gusts between the houses, carrying frozen debris that sandpapered the shiny surfaces outside until the world took
on a matte finish. Claudia stood for long spells staring out the windows. With Avery halted in mid-departure, she was enclosed
in a curious last-ditch frenzy of lustful imagination. When they sat in the kitchen listening to the radio, she let her gaze
brood over Avery’s body. She watched his hands with an intensity detached from herself, not connected with anything she was
doing or saying at the moment. Nothing was clear to her in that time, neither elation nor despair; the waiting had muddled
her ideas. There was nothing to drink in the house, and they were solemn and sober and quiet. They listened with attention
to the news. A state of emergency had been declared, and the weather was discussed at great length. But Claudia was bemused
by the phenomenon of the ice. It disconcerted her more than she would have expected, and there was still no way to get Jane
home.

Claudia and Avery spent those long days going through the house room by room, packing and sorting until Avery would be able
to leave. They argued about the shoe racks or the china without passion. It was
Claudia who said that he should take those things, speaking out mostly for the sake of having noise in the house. He could
come get them anytime, of course, and he was indifferent; he pretended boredom. She would not be able to extend any influence
into his life that he planned to lead from now on. And he was ill at ease. Avery disliked being detained. He had always fidgeted
at stoplights, become embarrassingly irritable in checkout lines, bemoaned editorial delays. When they heard on the radio
that barge traffic was frozen to a standstill in St. Louis, at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, he had
got up and walked around the kitchen in frustration. He had taken a package of pecans out of the freezer, where Claudia was
saving them for Christmas, and stood at the window, staring out, eating the frozen nuts one by one and musing.

“I can’t believe that,” he said. “We can go to the moon. We can play golf on the moon—idiots!—but a frozen river is going
to cause grain shortages.”

“I know,” said Claudia, although most of the puzzles in the world, natural or engendered by mankind, did not surprise her,
and she was wise enough not to point out that this strange quirk of weather that paralyzed the region strengthened the theories
that Avery was currently expounding in his book.

The ice outside heaved and exploded randomly across the yard and road and up their front steps during the day, and then by
morning it would have frozen once more into new patterns of webs and craters. Claudia experienced sympathetic and random implosions
of lust while she watched Avery move among the boxes. The haggardness of his enforced sobriety was erotic; it would be a pleasure
to soothe him. At night she would dwell
on this and imagine that they were immobilized by unconsummated desire, not ice, in this abnormally frozen season. Those musings
would be half dream, and she would fall asleep restless with the idea of Avery touching her when, in fact, they took care
not even to brush fingers when they handed boxes back and forth.

Once Avery had been standing behind her while she sorted through a closet, and when she turned around, she was startled into
sudden irritation to find him so quietly nearby. She put her hands against his chest and lightly pushed him backward.

“I can do this myself. I know what you need to take. Please leave me alone!”

He stood there in front of her looking slightly baffled, and then he raised his hands against her in the same way she had
just shoved him away. He didn’t push her; he only placed a hand lightly over each of her breasts for a moment, long enough
so that she felt the warmth through her blouse. Then he dropped his hands to his sides and moved away. Claudia stood in the
doorway of the closet alert and tingling with the sensation of having been passed over by the ghost of a gesture, and she
shuddered involuntarily from head to toe out of sheer yearning.

Later that same day Avery was wrestling one of the twin-bed mattresses from the guest room down the spiral staircase just
as she was coming up the steps. They stopped, both of them embarrassed; a mattress is a final thing. Avery was taking it into
the garage, where he was gathering his belongings until he could leave. All at once he sat down on the steps, clasping the
cumbersome mattress, and began to weep without a sound. She sat down beside him.

“I don’t know how you expected this to be,” she said after a moment.

“Shit!” Avery said. “Fucking shit! It’s not all my fault, you know.” And he paused, shaking his head in a loose, downward
motion as though he were trying to jolt into his mind the words that would be what he meant. “It’s just not all my fault!
We really aren’t good for each other. We aren’t any help to each other. It isn’t all because I drink!”

Claudia looked at the mattress and wondered if Avery would rent a U-Haul. She had never thought that this had anything to
do with the fact that he drank. She knew that however they were together was really beside the point. Being good for each
other or not being good for each other—in their case those things were incidental. She was thinking of a maxim she had had
to memorize in her seventh-grade science class. Mrs. Greenfield had made them learn this fact: Adhesion and cohesion are the
two molecular forces of the earth. Without adhesion and cohesion everything would fly out into space.

This was a principle of the natural world that Claudia had never doubted for a minute, and it had never crossed her mind that
within that principle lay choice. The two of them were a unit, coherent each unto himself, and adherent one to the other.
The universe yawned implacably infinite now that one particle of that entity was breaking the bond. It defied her imagination
to picture what would become of them. She thought they might be lost forever, that they might, indeed, just float out into
space.

On that Saturday afternoon before the ice and while the exterminator was still roaming around her house, Jane phoned Diana
Tunbridge to tell her that she was coming over after all. They arranged to meet halfway across the meadow so that they could
walk back together to Diana’s. By the time she collected her things and packed her backpack she was overtaken once again by
that familiar dolefulness that assailed her whenever she deserted her mother and father. It worried her to leave them to their
own devices even when she was angry at them. They were still sitting quietly in the living room when she came downstairs,
and she stopped in the doorway to say good-bye, but both Avery and Claudia were abstracted, and her mother was a little irritable.

“All right, then, Janie. You are going?” Claudia raised her hand in a listless dismissal. “We’ll see you tomorrow. Have a
nice time.” This was not a wish for Jane, or encouragement. It was what her mother said by rote while her mind was working
on something else entirely, and as always, when Jane stepped outside her doorway, she was swept through and through with a
peculiar kind of loneliness. She suffered a paring away and sparseness at the very core of herself that left her unhappily
disburdened.

She set out through the meadow, and as she wound down the path through the grass, she saw Diana already waiting under the
cluster of trees where they always met. Without considering it Jane slowed her approach to allow some substance of the day
to fill her a little. Besides, this was not just any piece of land between two houses; she had invented this terrain at age
eight, when her parents had bought four acres from the Tunbridges’ and built their house. The steep path between her house
and the Tunbridges’ was of her own making, and it wound narrowly through the high grass. Diana was sitting beneath the Four
Trees—four great pin oaks that formed a hollow square. Summer before last she and Diana had buried a cache of candles and
matches and a flashlight there in two layers of Zip-loc bags and a larger plastic bag enclosing those and fastened with a
twist-tie.

They had marked the turnoff to the Troubled Rocks with a handful of assorted stones that they had arranged to look as if those
various pebbles had merely rolled into place there along the main path. Only one or the other of the girls could detect that
separate trail so subtly marked through the head-high weeds, and they could find their way along it to a large boulder and
some other good-sized rocks that lay in an inexplicable clearing. Jane had gone there alone, now and then, willing herself
to sit among those stones even when the low-moving clouds threw her into deep shadow beyond which she could see the sunshine.
At a moment like that she would press herself flat back against the boulder,
because such a selective darkening of her environment opened out before her an abyss of desolation so extreme that she lost
any faith in her surroundings. Most days, though, she was sure that that large boulder brimmed with serenity and that she
could draw some of it into herself merely by her own proximity to it.

“I don’t think we should call them the
troubled
rocks,” Diana had said when Jane first led her to them. They had spent arduous hours debating these points, naming their
landmarks. “I think it would be better to call them the Rocks of Trouble. Because we can come here if
we’re
in trouble, or if we’re depressed or something. I mean, the
rocks
can’t be troubled, Jane. What about the Comfort Rocks?”

Jane had disliked the meter. “No, Diana. That just doesn’t have the right sound.” And she had drawn her straight pale eyebrows
together in an unchallengeable expression. Privately she invested those few stones with an ability to suffer or give solace.
Pummeled as they were, mute and exposed, tossed into this space by some ancient force—Jane believed in them. When Jane gave
herself over to this landscape, she extended the connection between reality and sentiment. Each facet of this world that she
had named had personal significance, and she would move through the meadow in a state of exquisite melancholy that was a permutation
of nostalgia. Here was order. Here was control. Here was peace, and here was she; she was known.