Trust Me (9 page)

“You put it on a paper bag for a minute,” she said. “Did you
really
get the car stuck? Maybe you should call the man at the garage.”

“It just needs a little push,” he promised. “Come on, bundle up. It’ll be fun. Old Mrs. Whatsername across the street is out there with the birds, sweeping her porch. It’s beautiful.”

“I
know
it is,” she said. “I used to
love
snowstorms.”

“But not now, huh?” He stood and asked her, “Where’s the fucking shovel?”

She went upstairs, the belt of her sad bathrobe trailing, and he found the snow shovel in the basement. The furnace, whirring and stinking to itself, reminded him pleasantly that snow on the roof reduced the fuel bill. The old house needed insulation.
Everything needed something. On his way out through the kitchen he noticed a steaming cup of coffee she had poured for him, like one of those little caches one explorer leaves behind for another. To appease her, he took two scalding swallows before heading out into the wilderness of his brilliant back yard.

By the time Mark’s wife joined him, looking childish and fat and merry in her hood and mittens and ski leggings and fur-topped boots, he had shovelled away as much of the snow underneath and around the car as he could reach. The woman across the street had gone back into her house, the birds on her roof had flown away, and a yellow town truck had come down Hillcrest Road scattering sand. He had leaned on the shovel and waved at the men on the back as if they were all comrades battling together in a cheerful war.

She asked, “Do you want me to steer?”

“No, you push. It’ll just take a tiny push now. I’ll drive, because I know how to rock it.” He stationed her at the rear right corner of the car, where there happened to be a drift that came up over her knees. He felt her make the silent effort of not complaining. “The thing is,” he told her, “to keep it from sloughing sideways.”

“Sluing,” she said.

“Whatever it is,” he said, “keep it from doing that.”

But slue was just what it did; though he rammed the gearshift back and forth between first and reverse, the effect of all that rocking was—he could feel it—to work the right rear tire deeper into the little slippery socket on the downhill side. He assumed she was pushing, but he couldn’t see her in the mirror and he couldn’t feel her.

His stomach ached, with frustration and maple syrup. He got out of the car. His wife’s face was pink, exhilarated. Her hood was back and her hair had come undone. “You’re closer than you think,” she said. “Where’s the shovel?” She dabbled with it around the stuck tire, doing no good that he could see.

“It’s that damn little gutter,” he said, impotently itching to grab the shovel from her. “In the summer you’re not even conscious of its being there.”

She thrust the shovel into a mound so it stood upright and told him, “Sweetheart, now you push. You’re stronger than I am.”

Grudgingly, he felt flattered. “All right. We’ll try it. Now, with the accelerator—don’t gun it. You just dig yourself deeper with the spinning tires.”

“That’s what
you
were doing.”

“That’s because you weren’t pushing hard enough. And steer for the middle of the street, and rock it back and forth gently, back and forth; and don’t panic.”

As she listened to these instructions, a dimple beside the corner of her mouth kept appearing and disappearing. She got into the driver’s seat. A little shower of snow, loosened by the climbing sun, fell rustling through a nearby tree, and the woman across the street came onto her porch without the broom, plainly intending to watch. Her lipstick at this distance was like one of those identifying spots of color on birds.

Mark squatted down and pressed his shoulder against the trunk and gripped the bumper with his hands. A scratch in the paint glinted beneath his eyes. How had that happened? He still thought of their car as brand-new. Snow again insinuated its chill bite into his galosh. Nervous puffs of dirty smoke rippled out of the exhaust pipe and bounced against his legs. He was aware of the woman on the porch, watching. He felt all the windows of the neighborhood watching.

The woman in the driver’s seat eased out the clutch. The tires revolved, and the slippery ton of the automobile’s rear end threatened to slide farther sideways; but he fought it, and she fed more gas, and they seemed to gain an inch forward. Doing what she had told him, she rocked the car back, and at the peak of its backward swing gunned it forward again, and he felt their forward margin expand.
Good girl
. He heaved; they paused; the car rocked back and then forward again and he heaved so hard the flat muscles straddling his groin ached. Mark seemed to feel, somewhere within the inertial masses they were striving to manage, his personal strength register a delicate response, a flicker in the depths. The car relaxed backwards, and in this remission he straightened and saw through the rear window the back of the driver’s head, her hood down, her hair loosened. The wheels spun again, the car dipped forward through the trough it had worn, and its weight seemed to hang, sustained by his strength, on the edge of release. “Once more,” he shouted, trembling through the length of his legs. The car sagged back through an arc that had noticeably distended, and in chasing its forward swing with his pushing he had to take steps, one, two … 
three!
The rear tires, frantically excited and in their spinning spitting snow across his lower half, slithered across that invisible edge he had sensed. The ridge was broken through, and if he continued to push, it was with gratuitous exertion, adding himself through sheer affection to an irresistible momentum. They were free.

Feeling this also, she whipped the steering wheel to head herself downhill and braked to a stop some yards away. The car, stuttering smoke from its exhaust pipe, perched safe in the center of the sand-striped width of Hillcrest Road. It was a 1960 Plymouth SonoRamic Commando V-8, with fins. Its driver, silhouetted with her nose tipped up, looked much too frail to have managed so big a thing.

Mark shouted “Great!” and leaped over the shattered ridge, brandishing the shovel. The woman on the porch called something to him he couldn’t quite catch but took kindly. He walked to his car and opened the door and got in beside his wife. The heater had come on; the interior was warm. He repeated, “You were great.” He was still panting.

She rosily smiled and said, “So were you.”

T
HE EVENTS
felt spaced in a vast deep sky, its third dimension dizzying. Looking back, Betty could scarcely believe that the days had come so close together. But, no, there, flat on the calendar, they were, one after another—four bright February days.

Sunday, after church, Rob had taken her and the children cross-country skiing. They made a party of it. He called up Evan, because they had discussed the possibility at the office Friday, while the storm was raging around their green-glass office building in Hartford, and she, because Evan, a bachelor, was Lydia Smith’s lover, called up the Smiths and invited them, too; it was the sort of festive, mischievous gesture Rob found excessive. But Lydia answered the phone and was delighted. As her voice twittered in Betty’s ear, Betty stuck out her tongue at Rob’s frown.

They all met at the Pattersons’ field in their different-colored cars and soon made a line of dark silhouettes across the white pasture. Evan and Lydia glided obliviously into the
lead; Rob and Billy, the son now almost the size of the father, and Fritzie Smith, who in imitation of her mother was quite the girl athlete, occupied the middle distance, the little Smith boy struggling to keep up with this group; and Betty and her baby—poor bitterly whining, miserably ill-equipped Jennifer—came last, along with Rafe Smith, who didn’t ski as much as Lydia and whose bindings kept letting go. He was thinner than Rob, more of a clown, fuller of doubt, hatchet-faced and green-eyed: a sad, encouraging sort of man. He kept telling Jennifer, “Ups-a-daisy, Jenny, keep in the others’ tracks, now you’ve got the rhythm, oops,” as the child’s skis scrambled and she toppled down again. Meanwhile, one of Rafe’s feet would have come out of his binding and Betty would have to wait, the others dwindling in the distance into dots.

The fields were immense in their brilliance. Her eyes winced, taking them in. The tracks of their party, and the tracks of the Sno-Cats that had frolicked here in the wake of the storm, scarcely touched the marvellous blankness—slopes up and down, a lone oak on a knoll, rail fences like pencilled hatchings, weathered No Trespassing signs not meant for them. Rob had done business with one of the Patterson sons and would bluff a challenge through; the fields seemed held beneath a transparent dome of Rob’s protection. A creek, thawed into audible life, ran where two slopes met. Betty was afraid to follow the tracks of the others here; it involved stepping, in skis, from snowbank to snowbank across a width of icy, confident, secretive water. She panicked and took the wooden bridge fifty yards out of their way. Rafe lifted Jennifer up and stepped across, his binding snapping on the other side but no harm done. The child laughed for the first time that afternoon.

The sun came off the snow hot; Betty thought her face
would get its first touch of tan today, and then it would not be many weeks before cows grazed here again, bringing turds to the mayflowers. Pushing up the slope on the other side of the creek, toward the woods, she slipped backwards and fell sideways. The snow was moist, warm. “Shit,” she said, and was pleasurably aware of the massy uplifted curve of her hip in jeans as she looked down over it at Rafe behind her, his green eyes sun-narrowed, alert.

“Want to get up?” he asked, and held out a hand, a damp black mitten. As she reached for it, he pulled off the mitten, offering her a bare hand, bony and pink and startling, so suddenly exposed to the air. “Ups-a-daisy,” he said, and the effort of pulling her erect threw him off balance, and a binding popped loose again. Both she and Jenny laughed this time.

At the entrance of the path through the woods, Rob waited with evident patience. Before he could complain, she did: “Jennifer is going crazy on these awful borrowed skis.
Why
can’t she have decent equipment like other children?”

“I’ll stay with her,” her husband said, both firm and evasive in his way, avoiding the question with an appearance of meeting it, and appearing selfless in order to shame her. But she felt the smile on her face persist as undeniably, as unerasably, as the sun on the field. Rob’s face clouded, gathering itself to speak; Rafe interrupted, apologizing, blaming their slowness upon himself and his defective bindings. For a moment that somehow made her shiver inside—perhaps no more than the flush of exertion meeting the chill blue shade of the woods, here at the edge—the two men stood together, intent upon the mechanism, her presence forgotten. Rob found the mis-adjustment, and Rafe’s skis came off no more.

In the woods, Rob and Jennifer fell behind, and Rafe slithered ahead, hurrying to catch up to his children and, beyond
them, to his wife and Evan. Betty tried to stay with her husband and child, but they were too maddening—one whining, the other frowning, and neither grateful for her company. She let herself ski ahead, and became alone in the woods, aware of distant voices, the whisper of her skis, the soft companionable heave of her own breathing. Pine trunks shifted about, one behind another and then another, aligned and not aligned, shadowy harmonies. Here and there the trees grew down into the path; a twig touched her eye, so lightly she was surprised to find pain lingering, and herself crying. She came to an open place where paths diverged. Here Rafe was waiting for her; thin, leaning on his poles, he seemed a shadow among others. “Which way do you think they went?” He sounded breathless and acted lost. His wife and her lover had escaped him.

“Left is the way to get back to the car,” she said.

“I can’t tell which are their tracks,” he said.

“I’m so sorry,” Betty said.

“Don’t be.” He relaxed on his poles, and made no sign of moving. “Where is Rob?” he asked.

“Coming. He took over dear Jennifer for me. I’ll wait, you go on.”

“I’ll wait with you. It’s too scary in here. Do you want that book?” The sentences followed one another evenly, as if consequentially.

The book was about Jane Austen, by an English professor Betty had studied under years ago, before Radcliffe called itself Harvard. She had noticed it lying on the front seat of the Smiths’ car while they were all fussing with their skis, and had exclaimed with recognition, of a sort. In a strange suspended summer of her life, the summer when Billy was born, she had read through all six of the Austen novels, sitting on a sun-porch waiting and waiting and then suddenly nursing. “If you’re done with it.”

“I am. It’s tame, but dear, as you would say. Could I bring it by tomorrow morning?”

He had recently left a law firm in Hartford and opened an office here in town. He had few clients but seemed amused, being idle. There was something fragile and incapable about him. “Yes,” she said, adding, “Jennifer comes back from school at noon.”