Thin Ice (8 page)

In those early months
after Ziggy was gone to Yale, Paul simply disappeared.  He went to college in town, but I didn’t see him at all.  And no one saw Lucy Bacchus either, except for my mom. 

“Guess who I ran into today?”

Krishna and I stared at each other in horror as my mom told us that Lucy had become a born-again Christian. 

Gay shook her head as if to awaken from a bad dream
.  “Oh my God, what a moron she is!” she said, and Krishna giggled in agreement. 

“Ug
h,” Krishna said.

“She seems happy and nice
.  She was polite to me, and asked me how I was doing,” said my mom.

“Gross!” we
exclaimed.

“I was impressed,” said my mom.

“Does that explain why she hasn’t been in school lately?” I asked.

“She’s with a group
.  A Christian group of some kind.  I think she’s moved in with them, some kind of camp.  Anyway, she was polite. I think she’s doing very well.”

We lay
on gold couch cushions.  My mom had stopped straightening and bitching at us long enough to tell us about Lucy.  Now she began dusting the bar holding the thick, gold curtains.  While she was dusting, the curtains were pulled back to reveal the sheer, white curtain, through which we could see the yard and the big, white house next door.

We
had our feet up on the coffee table, chain-smoking and watching Mom work.

Finally Gay said, “
Mrs. Anderson, would you like some help with that?”

“
A little late; I’m already done.  And besides,” Mom said, “what I want is for you to go on home.  You’ve been over here all day.”

Gay choked on her coffee
.  She was probably surprised at my mother’s bluntness. 

“She’s
tired,” I said, “from bitching.”

I said this not when my mom was actually in the room, but a couple seconds after she had left.

“I wonder why she never notices the pot smell,” said Krishna.

“She’s probably acclimated to it,” said Gay.

We watched the falling leaves, a sure sign that snow and cold would be coming soon.  And Ziggy would be coming home.  A thought we shared silently.

M
y mom came back in the room with a broom.  She wielded it by the handle, swinging the bristles at my friends.  I couldn’t believe it.

“What?
!” I shouted.  “You are out of control!”

She was trying to sweep them out of the room
.  They went running in different directions, willy-nilly.  Mom took a whack at Krishna’s head.  Krishna’s hair went static and started flying up.  Mom whacked at Gay and clipped the side of her head with the brush bristles.  It probably didn’t hurt, but Gay shrieked anyway, partly from fear, partly from shock, partly from anger.

“What the hell kind of disrespect is that?” I shouted at my mom.

“Let’s get out of here,” Gay shouted, partially giggling.  I grabbed the car keys from Mom’s purse.

“You are not taking my car,” my mom shouted.

“How do you want me to get them home then?”

“Let them walk!”

“Let’s go,” I said.  I had the keys in my hand.  We ran for the door.  The glass doors had been put in for winter; the screen doors were gone.  I was half-thinking the door would break behind us.  We skidded out of the driveway and headed off into nowhere, because nobody wanted to go home. 

I was sick of Gay
.  I didn’t want to drop Krishna off and go home, and I didn’t want to go hang out somewhere, so I was happy joyriding.  I was just sick of Gay. 

“I know what you’re doing,” Gay said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I know you
’re trying to drop me off.”

“Why, what do you mean?”

“You keep driving by Lake Street, fucking five minutes, driving up and down fucking Bowen, Carp Ponds.  You think I can’t figure that out?”

T
ingling humiliation swept up and down my legs.  The back of my scalp pricked.

“No way,” I said
.  How lame.  But what else could I say?  I felt like a little kid.  I’d been caught.

I stopped driving past her street, drove clear to the other side of town
. 

We drove in relative silence for a while, Gay fuming and pouting and refusing dope, sitting with her arms folded
.  I supposed now she was never going to let me drop her off. 

Actually, that wasn’t true
.  She finally asked to be dropped off at Glinda’s, but not until she was the last one in the car.  Before she slammed the back door, she said, “Hey, can you give me a ride to school tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

I didn’t mind driving Gay to school, really I didn’t.  I didn’t usually run into Glinda if I was dropping Gay off, and not going inside, which I never did, since Ziggy wasn’t there. 

I saw Glinda in
Mrs. De Muprathne’s class.  Glinda was there the day Mrs. De Muprathne made her big announcement.  Both of them, Glinda and Mrs. De Muprathne, had been holding back a secret for a week—or months. 

T
he day Mrs. De Muprathne announced it, she looked ready to pop with glee.  She also had a certain way of speaking.  I don’t know how to describe it—almost like she had cotton in her mouth and a strong, elitist accent at the same time.  She sure didn’t sound like she was from around here.  Boston? 

A
nyway, when she made her big announcement I had that same feeling I had in the history class when the teacher announced they’d be watching a special video by a certain Dr. Watson.  “For your information,” I had wanted to say, “Dr. Watson was over for dinner at my house practically every other weekend when I was a little kid.  Why should I sit here and watch him on film?”

That’s how I felt when I heard, “We have a special guest coming this afternoon
.  One of our former students attends one of the most prestigious universities in this country.  He received admission to Yale University upon winning a statewide mathematics competition.  None of you will ever attend a school as prestigious as that one.”

I was surprised to hear her say this.
I knew of at least four or five people from the previous year who had gone on to prestigious universities. There was Kumar Dasgupta from last year who went to Princeton, and Sophia Carlson who went to Harvard.  None of them had been invited to speak about it either.  I wondered vaguely why she was doing this, and telling this ridiculous lie. 

“
He will be here to answer questions,” she continued, “to tell you what it is like to attend this fine university of higher learning.  Please give a warm welcome to. . . .”

I started coughing so loud
ly I couldn’t hear his name.  Then the applause started, and thank goodness, because it drowned out what became the worst coughing fit of my life.  I was stuck in the back corner, practically shoved up against a window, next to Krishna and Gay, who normally didn’t attend my Shakespeare appreciation class, but who had squeezed in a few minutes before the guest of honor had appeared.  I couldn’t leave and the coughing fit still wasn’t stopping, long after the applause did.  I tried to hide it.  I tried to cover my mouth.  My face would turn beet red, I am sure, as my cheeks puffed up and I started choking once again, in the middle of Ziggy trying to tell us about his magnificent school.  His arms were folded as usual, feet stuck out and crossed way out in front of him.  He was graceful enough not to look over at me, but no one else was.  Finally, Mrs. De Muprathne went and found me a tiny Dixie cup of water, which I promptly spewed over the people sitting in front of me. 

It was never going to stop
.  It never was.  I coughed and coughed and coughed and coughed.  I coughed through his description of the classes. I coughed through his description of the campus (which he had already told me looked like Disneyland). I coughed through the question and answer period.  I didn’t hear a single thing.  Every time I tried to stop, the coughing would well up inside me again and I would explode with it. 

I finally
stood up, excused myself, and left the class.  Still coughing, I had to step over feet and squeeze between students.  I made more of a scene than I already had. 

Ziggy never looked at me
.  When I think back on it, it wasn’t that big a deal, someone having a coughing fit.  But the minute I left that classroom, the coughing stopped.  Immediately.  I took another drink of water from the fountain just in case and came back into the room, made it all the way—brushing past the students—to my little corner next to the wall, the window, and Krishna.  But the minute I sat down again, it started.  This time I knew other people were looking at me.  I tried to hide my face, but the coughing was so loud there was no point trying to hide. 

I
knew everyone was looking, I just knew it.  But there was one person not looking, I knew, ’cause I saw him out of the corner of my eye looking down, looking to his right, not over here to his left, arms folded, legs crossed way out in front of him.  When I had to leave the classroom a second time, he moved his legs back so I wouldn’t trip over them.  But he never looked up.

I walked down the hall
.  I was wearing Glinda’s alligator pants, which I had mended.  I sat on a bench in the cafeteria by myself.  Of course, my coughing had stopped immediately, once again. 

Yale
might look like Disneyland, but Oshkosh North looked a zoo.  White cages, monkey-bar picnic tables, plastic trays.  I bet they had nice dishes to eat out of at Yale.  I bet they were fine china, stuff my mother wouldn’t let us eat off. 

I didn’t
know why we had fine china.  If I had thought of it while drunk, I probably would have hurled those fine china plates across the kitchen one by one, along with the dainty little teacups, and the beautiful tiles she had on the walls in the blue dining room, with little pictures of windmills and maidens done in blue paint.

There was a question forming in my brain
.  Somewhere down near the reptilian base.  It tickled.  It reached up and clawed me from time to time.  I couldn’t quite articulate it. 

That night, an hour past midnight, it sank its claws in deep and refused to let go. 
“Mom!” I screamed.  I felt like I was suffocating.  I thought someone was trying to kill me.  I screamed her name at the top of my lungs. “Mom!”

How did she hear me through the godless
, spinning, gold living room, around the corner into the red hallway and up the red staircase, up to the door of the bathroom where the tub and shower was, left into her blue and white bedroom where the passageways behind the walls led?  My back bedroom door wasn’t open, out into the darkness of the backyard. 

The infinite backyard
.  You could wander way out into the night.  You could wander barefoot, carrying an empty champagne bottle, and feel the wet grass between your toes.  You could wander in circles under the bushes, the lilac bushes.  Then you could turn around and take another drink from the empty bottle and wander out back behind the neighbor’s garage.  There you could pass out completely, until you woke up kissing some nameless face.

My dad walked into the kitchen.
  “There is a job opening at the Sunnyside Retirement home,” he said. 

I had
been sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee.  I set the cup down on the table, leaned my chin on my hand, and rested my elbow on the rippled glass.  Outside, the leaves were still green.  They had not begun to turn colors yet.

“In order to apply, you need to call, or go down there and talk to a woman named Francine
.  It is located on Bowen Street.  Here is the address.”  He handed me a piece of paper.  I didn’t take it, so he set it down on the table.  “You be sure and follow up on this.”

“Yea
h. I will, Dad,” I said, and lit a cigarette.  I smoked and drank coffee. I liked to let the ash on the end of the cigarette grow long.  I liked to see how long it would become before falling off from its own weight. 

My dad went downstairs to his office
.  He had a desk at the bottom of the stairs that was always covered with papers to grade.

I did nothing to follow up on the job
.  I never picked up the piece of paper.  A few days later, however, he brought it up again.  This time he approached me in the living room.  I was alone watching TV and he came in and said, “I’ve been to the Sunnyside Retirement Home.”

“What?” I said.

He turned down the TV.

“Hey, I was watching that!” I said
.  “That’s the
Andy Griffith Show
.  I love that show!”

He turned it back up again.
  “I went to talk to them about the job.”

I ignored him and watched the show.

“They said you could come down there and apply any time.  They have a job waiting for you.”

“Thanks
, Dad.”

He stood there a minute
.  I could see him out of the corner of my eye.  He wore a tie and short-sleeve shirt with light-tan stripes, sort of crisscrossed.  He had glasses and pens in his shirt pocket.  He only had a shirt pocket on one side of the shirt.  He usually didn’t wear his suit coat with it, but when he went to office he usually put that on, on his way out the door.  “Do you want to sit down and watch the show with me?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said, and sat down in the big
, green easy chair.  I remembered the day my grandmother had bought it for him.  I remembered her saying to my mother, “He needs an easy chair.  I’ll get him a La-Z-Boy.”  I remembered thinking at the time that the last thing my dad was, was lazy.  What on earth did he need a La-Z-Boy for?  And this was one of the few times I ever saw him use it.  To watch the
Andy Griffith Show
or
M.A.S.H.
with me.  He never watched TV for himself.  Usually he was reading or working, and the books he was reading weren’t easy books.  They were history texts or philosophical treatises or the college papers he had to grade. 

When the show was over
, Dad asked me if I would come in the car with him and go down to the Sunnyside Retirement Home.

“Ok
ay, I guess I’ll go with you.”

I wasn’t sure why I said that
.  I didn’t want to go, but didn’t have anything else to do, and he had watched the show with me.

We rode in his car, the one I was almost never allowed to drive, the one he
’d named Mitsy.

I went into the flat building with him and down the hall
.  I had a sense of unreality.  I wasn’t really stoned, although I was always a little stoned; I just didn’t know why I was there.  Francine, a woman who wore too much hairspray, greeted me and invited me into her my office.  My dad waited in the hall.

She had me fill out the job application
.  It was funny.  The minute I started filling it out, I suddenly wanted the job.  But I hadn’t cared if I was given the job before I started filling out that paperwork.

Francine looked at the paperwork and started asking me questions
.  I was polite in my responses, answered her questions, and was informed that I’d start next week.  She asked me what size I wore, handed me a pink, polyester uniform, and told me that I needed to buy some white nursing shoes. 

“Make sure they’re comfortable
.  You’ll be on your feet a lot.”

W
ith that, she opened the door for me.  I walked out.  My dad was waiting for me.  He had the half-smile he sometimes wore.

W
e drove home.  I started work the following Monday.  My work day went from after school till 9:00 in the evening.  It never occurred to me to quit, or that it interfered with my party lifestyle.

I had been working for several weeks when I
received a letter from Ziggy.  It said, “I can’t believe you took on a job as a nurse’s aide.  That is a difficult job.  And you didn’t take it and quit, like my mom said you would.  You actually stuck it out.  I’m impressed.”

I thought about what he
’d said.  I guessed it was a hard job.  I’d never thought about it before. 

Sure, at the time
, some things happened that I did think about.  We had to change colostomy bags, diapers, and clean up areas of the body I would have preferred not to see.  We had to clean around feeding tubes inserted into the stomach, and open cancerous holes.  Certainly it was gross, but whenever I worked on the patients, I was thinking of the person.  I usually tried to talk to them while I dressed their wounds or cleaned them.  The most difficult patients were the ones who were comatose.

I liked to hear their stories
.  I really did.  They told me about their lives.  They had such interesting stories that I would become caught up, and forget about the gruesome sores.  Whenever I could, I looked in their eyes and not at their wounds. 

It
grew to where I would find myself thinking about their stories at home.  I would tell my mom about the people.  I would sit at the kitchen table, or walk around it while she was cooking, and tell her. “And then there is this woman named Rosie.  She is adorable.  You should see her.  She is tiny.  And she has this husband who is at least twice her size.  How do you suppose they got together?  Don’t you ever wonder about that?”

“I suppose so,” Mom said, and stirred the potatoes with an amused smile
.  She was like me—or I should say, I was like her.  She loved to people-watch.

“I always wonder that,” I said
, “when I see a tall person with a short one.”

“Like your dad and me,” said Mom
. “Only I’m the tall one.”

“I know,”
I said, and laughed.

“I’m a whole head taller than your dad.”

“It’s pretty strange.  And I always wonder how you two got together.  Why you would date a man much shorter than you.”

W
e had the conversation we always had about how they met in Kansas.  She had been a tall girl of seventeen who ran around barefoot, and he had been on leave during the war and hadn’t been able to take his eyes off her. 

I never had much homework
—or if I did, I didn’t bother with it.  The days were growing shorter, the leaves were falling off the trees, and the first snow was just around the corner.  Mostly, I worked and went home, and saw less of my friends.  Usually the only time I saw them was at school.  I opened a savings account and began saving money.  I didn’t know what I was saving the money for, but I knew it was a good idea to save money.  I had close to $300 by the time the first freeze came along, and when the snow started falling in earnest.  By the time Oshkosh became like a Christmas card, I was fully used to my job at Sunnyside Retirement home.  Soon Christmas would arrive. 

A
ll Krishna and Gay and I could talk about was that soon Ziggy would be home for the holidays.