Wintertide: A Novel (2 page)

I departed at the last possible
moment. The campus was deserted. The janitors were beginning to make the rounds
of the dormitories checking to see that everyone was out before they locked up
the buildings. I boarded a bus to Hyannis. I was one of only five passengers. The
two hour ride was uneventful. The tall, shiny buildings disappeared, and the
land flattened out into long stretches of brown grass and leaf-bare trees. We
rode over the Sagamore Bridge, and I peered down at the Cape Cod Canal. The
water flowed smoothly and slowly beneath us. A broken, jagged film of ice lined
the edges of the waterway. Heavy barges inched their way toward their
destinations.

The bus turned into the parking lot
that served as the local station. The other passengers stood, stretching their
legs and collecting their bags. I waited until everyone had departed before
making my own way to the exit. My mother was waiting to pick me up in her beat-up
brown Buick. I spotted her immediately. She was bundled in her blue ski jacket
and had on a white wool cap and gloves. Her baggy, khaki pants were tucked into
rubber fisherman boots. Her face lit up when I stepped off the bus into the
chilled, salty air. She had to stand on tiptoe when she reached out her arms to
embrace me. She looked the same as when I had last seen her during that brief
visit in August, a bit heavier maybe. Her curly, grey hair peaked out from under
the bottom and sides of her cap. Her nose and soft wrinkled cheeks were ruddy
and flushed. Her pale blue eyes, which mirrored my own, sparkled to life when
she spotted me. I swallowed the guilt I felt clogging my throat.

"Oh, Daniel," she said,
already chastising me, "why didn’t you wear your heavy winter coat? You'll
freeze to death. You remember how cold it can get here. Come on now, get in the
car quickly. We'll just have to dig out one of your old coats when we get home.
You're so grown-up looking. I can hardly believe it.”

The interior of the car smelled
like cigarettes. The vinyl seats were split open in several places. The radio
was gone, having been stolen years ago. The ashtray was pulled open overflowing
with old butts and candy wrappers. "I thought you said Dad quit smoking?"

Mom pulled out of the parking lot
and into traffic. "Well, you know your father," she said with a sigh.

It was a simple enough statement. The
thing was, I didn't know my father at all.

As the car moved slowly toward our
house, my college world, the one into which I had so fervently immersed myself,
began to slowly fade away. I groped for it as we moved down the narrow wooded
road, recalling my dormitory room, my friends, the term paper that ruled my
life for weeks. They all seemed distant and fleeting. Reality was South Seaport
again. That drowning feeling, suffocation and entrapment all inexplicably
rushed in on me. I knew I would leave again in a few weeks, but it didn't
matter in that moment. The distance I had put between myself and this small town,
both physical as well as mental, was slipping away with each mile of road the
car covered.

As Mom drove toward home, I found
myself giving her a lifeless account of the past semester. I also absently
agreed to get a haircut, to search for my old winter coat, and to help her pick
out a Christmas tree.

"Of course, if that professor
needs you to come work for him on those days, then you'll just have to take the
car and do that. I'll make do without it."

I turned toward her. Her eyes were
on the road. "I'm not sure how often Professor Sheffield is going to want
me. It could be several days a week. I told him I needed all the hours I could
get."

"Don't worry. I understand. All
I'm saying is that this is your vacation, and your father and I hardly get to
see you at all. We just want to spend as much time as possible with you,
Daniel.”

My stomach churned.

Our street looked the same. The
house was the same. I thought that I could probably leave and not come back for
at least one hundred years and the house and the entire block would remain
exactly the same. Dad's truck wasn't in the driveway when we arrived. I felt
relieved.

The small, weather-worn clapboard
house with its squat, square windows and red door was badly in need of a
painting. The molding was nearly gone, and small speckles of white paint clung
lifelessly to the grey wood. The ground was littered with paint flakes. It
hadn't snowed yet this season, and the burnt yellow grass was matted flat to
the dirt. The sky was a low leaden curtain. I couldn't have conjured up a
bleaker image if I’d tried.

Mom emerged from the car happily
and made a good show of trying to lift my large duffel bag from the back seat.

"Mom, please stop. It's too
heavy."

She moved aside so I could reach in.
"All right I give up. I just don't want you to have to work, that's all. It's
your vacation."

As I followed her up the cement
path to the front door, I made a sweeping motion with my arm and said, "I
love what you've done with the place. It looks great."

She put the key in the hole and
turned to me curiously, seeming surprised. "Well your father's been very
busy. I've been after him to paint the house."

I immediately felt badly. "I'm
kidding. Everything looks the same. That's all I meant."

  Our house originally belonged to
my grandparents, my mother’s parents, who had redecorated the interior during
the sixties. When my parents took the house over, they didn’t change a thing,
not the green rugs or the gold and beige furniture, not the white and yellow
kitchen with the curled and scuffed linoleum flooring. The whole place smelled
damp and musty, as though no one had bothered to open a window in years.

As my mother instructed, I brought
my bag up to my bedroom. The same old pictures lined the narrow upstairs hallway.
I saw myself at different ages and Mom and Dad when they were younger. There
were no recent photographs of them. The last picture taken of me was in high
school.

My room was just as I had left it. In
the far corner stood a dark wooden dresser and a night stand. Under the window,
my bed was neatly made with a crochet spread my mother had sewn. There was the plastic
Godzilla poised atop my bookshelf next to my long discarded comic books. I
threw my bag down on the bed and peered out the window. I could see the dense
woods across the lane. When I couldn’t sleep I would go and sit out there,
sometimes alone, sometimes not.

I turned when I heard my mother
coming down the hall. She stopped in the doorway. It dwarfed her with its
height. With her coat off, I could see clearly that she had put on weight since
I’d last seen her.

"I think Seth Cooper is home
for the holidays. You might want to give him a call."

I started pulling hopelessly
wrinkled clothes from my bag. "I don't think so. We haven't talked in a
while."

"Well I saw his mother in the
supermarket and told her to let Seth know you would be home for a few weeks. It
wouldn't hurt for you to be nice to him. That family has gone through a very
difficult time."

"You can say the word, Mom. Lots
of people get divorced."

She gave me a cross look. "Just
because everyone is doing something, that doesn't make it right. We're living
in a throwaway society now. Values just don't seem to mean anything
anymore."

Throwaway society
. I
wondered which talk show she had heard that on. "If two people are unhappy
with each other, they should get divorced rather than live the rest of their
lives being miserable," I said pointedly.

Her eyes widened. Then she looked
away and pretended I was speaking hypothetically. "Well I still say it's
not right. If you're not prepared to make a lifetime commitment, then you just
shouldn't. That's all there is to it."

For the first time I noticed the
dark circles under her eyes. She turned to leave and said, "I've made your
favorite butterscotch chip cookies. Come downstairs when you're ready."

Three weeks suddenly seemed like a
very, impossibly long amount of time.

I called Professor Sheffield that
afternoon after I had some of the insisted upon milk and butterscotch chip cookies.
We had agreed that I would phone him when I arrived home. His calm, familiar voice
improved my mood. He told me to enjoy some time at home, and then let him know
when I was available. I assured him that I was free immediately. He gave me
directions to his house, which was about twenty minutes away. It was decided
that I would start tomorrow.

As the daylight waned, Mom traveled
from room to room switching on lights. When she entered the small kitchen
again, I was sitting at the table pulling a few more cookies from the neck of
the orange Garfield cookie jar. She replaced the head, scooped the jar up off the
table and brought it to the counter. "That's enough. You won't be hungry
for dinner."

There was a chicken roasting in the
oven. The tangy aroma filled the room. The grey sky was slowly darkening
through the kitchen window. Suddenly, I was struck by the silence. In the city,
there was always the sound of traffic, car horns, loud motors, but here it was
completely quiet. The isolation seemed overwhelming, no cars, no planes passing
by overhead. In the winter there wasn't even the sound of birds or crickets. There
was only Maggie Hiller, bustling about in her kitchen, humming softly to
herself. I thought how lonely it must be for her now that I'm gone. I was hit
by guilt again. I watched her silently, wondering what she had been like before
she’d met Dad.

She felt my eyes on her and grinned
at me.

"What time is Dad coming
home?" I asked, glancing away.

She turned back toward the pot she
had cooking on the stove. "Well it could be pretty late. I think we should
just eat, and he can get something for himself when he comes in."

"He's working late?"

She hesitated, the spoon she was
stirring with stopping for a brief moment before beginning to move around in a
circular motion again. "Yes, or he may be meeting Tom and some other
friends for a drink."

"Does he know I'm home?"

"Of course he does.” She
continued to talk with her back to me. "He just needs to unwind after work."
Then she busied herself with setting the table.

After dinner, I sat on the couch in
the living room and watched the end of
Casino Royale
. There was a
twenty-four hour James Bond marathon on. At around ten o'clock, Mom kissed my
cheek lightly and said goodnight. I had the lights turned off, and the glow of
the television flickered around the room bringing the walls to life around me. My
dad's old leather chair sat in the other corner against the wall. The outline
of his body was worn into the scuffed surface. The numerous tiny crystal
figurines, a swan, a delicate horse, a tiny dog, that covered every available
surface, glimmered blue in the dull light. Gradually, the sounds of the movie,
a tinny cadence through the old television speaker, became softer, and I must
have dozed off because when I looked up again, there was my father standing
over me, one half of his face illuminated by the TV screen, the other half
hidden in shadows.

Momentarily startled, I sat up and
rubbed my eyes. He placed a hand on my shoulder. His face appeared old with
deep creases, covered by rough grey whiskers. He had on a navy baseball cap.

"Daniel, it's good to see you,"
he whispered. "Has your mother gone to bed?"

I nodded sleepily. "A few
hours ago.”

He glanced at the television,
standing silently for a moment. I wondered if he was going to sit down beside
me. He made no move to do so. "Well," he said turning to look down at
me again, "how has school been going? I understand you've been making those
good grades we're used to."

My neck started to ache from
looking up, so I stood. I was a few inches taller than him. He was eye level
with my nose. He seemed a bit surprised as he looked up me. "Those young
college girls must be chasing after you," he said with a smile.

I thought I detected a certain
amount of pride in his words. "I have to beat them off with a stick,"
I acknowledged with a perfectly straight face.

He laughed for a moment, flashing
his yellow teeth, patting me lightly on the back. "Well, it's late. I'd
better head up to bed. You coming upstairs?"

"No, I think I'll stay down
here a while longer."

"It's good to have you home,
son.” He glanced at me one last time. Then he said goodnight and left the room.

The smell of whisky lingered in the
air after he had gone. Before I left for school, Dad at least came home for
dinner every night and reserved his drinking for weekends and holidays. I
waited until I heard the bedroom door close upstairs. Then I turned off the
television and quietly went up to my own room. I changed in the dark. My
mattress was as old as I was. It sagged uncomfortably in the middle. As my head
sank down into the pillow, the smell of the crisp white sheets, that musty
mothball scent, engulfed me and plunged me back in time. I propped myself up on
my elbows and peered out the window into the darkened woods across the way. There
was no moonlight, and beyond the first row of trees the world dropped off into
black nothingness. Stored pictures of moments I’d spent there flashed through
my mind.

How was Eddie, I wondered? Seth,
Eddie and I would spend hours out there with beer Eddie had gotten using a fake
ID. What had we talked about? Seth's parents, my parents, girls, Eddie's father.
Our conversations always came around to Eddie's father. Eddie often had bruises
on his face and body, some new and red, others old and purple. His father beat
him. It was no secret. Yet no one ever did anything about it, not his teachers,
not his neighbors, not me. His mother walked out a long time ago. Our
discussions usually ended with Eddie describing a fantasy he had about his
father dying in some horrific manner. Seth and I would become silent at that
point, uncomfortably glancing at each other with downcast eyes. Then Eddie
would start laughing and rolling around drunkenly in the grass. We would laugh
along with him, grateful that he was no longer being morbid.