Black Ice Read online

  The pipe appeared again. I had cleared up by now. If I could only get this thing right, I thought. Again it burned. “Hot lips,” I croaked.

  They laughed hysterically and lifted the pipe out of my fingers. I didn’t feel like laughing.

  Doug asked me for a cigarette. The get-high folkways had it that smoking a cigarette would extend the high. I passed cigarettes all around, thinking in that way to attenuate my debt for my two gulps of weed, and still hoping that the lovely feeling would kick in.

  I did have a delayed response to drugs, after all. It had taken a double dose of anesthetic to get me under for my tonsil operation when I was a kid. As I stood with my feet in the snow like the Grinch on Christmas morning, I remembered the hospital in South Philadelphia when I was seven. I remembered dozing lightly and waking up in the hallway outside a big, noisy room with white lights. That was the operating room, I had thought. A tall black man was standing over me, ready to roll my bed into the room. He was wearing a green cap, gathered around the bottom and puffed out over his head like a Victorian night cap. People in the white room were laughing and talking together casually. I had never heard doctors speak like that. “Hey, wait a minute,” the man yelled to the doctors and nurses. “This child is still awake.”

  “She is?”

  “Are you awake?” he asked me.

  I nodded yes. I had been trying to go to sleep like a good girl. I had lain “still as death”—one of my old relatives (I wondered who) had always used that phrase, and that’s what I had tried to do. I had been able to doze, ever so gently, but not sleep. I couldn’t get my thumb into my mouth. What had they done to my arm? I couldn’t sleep without sucking my thumb. Then the man with the green gown and cap smiled at me and rubbed my cheek with his forefinger. It felt good to be rubbed. I was glad that he was not as angry as he had seemed when I’d opened my eyes. Then they gave me another needle. “You’ll be asleep in a minute, sweetheart. Don’t worry.”

  When I awoke, my throat hurt. It burned. I was alone in a gray room. Not alone, there were other crib beds with other sleeping children. I could look out a big window and see the hallway. A nurse walked by. I tried to call her to ask where my mother was, but she walked fast and did not look my way. I tried to put my thumb in my mouth, but I could not. The doctors had a cast on my arm. I looked at my hand. It was no more than a foot away from my face. I could not get it any closer. I began to cry. My throat felt as if it would tear open with each sob.

  I snapped out of my reverie when I felt the hot pipe being pressed into my hand again.

  “No, thanks,” I said. “I’m afraid that that stuff just doesn’t work with me.”

  “Doesn’t work, eh? You look pretty wasted to me.”

  “Could be that it affects your body differently,” one of the girls theorized dreamily. “Do you have other allergies? Food allergies? Respiratory?”

  “Oh, yeah. I’m allergic to everything.”

  “Maybe that’s it.”

  “Or maybe it’s just that it’s your first time.”

  “Lib! Is this your first time getting high?”

  “Or not getting high.”

  They giggled a great deal.

  “Well, if it’s not doing any good, don’t waste it. Pass it here.”

  “You are so greedy.”

  “Who’s greedy? I haven’t had any more than you have.”

  “One potato, two potato, three potato, four—”

  “Shhhhh.”

  We all went silent. “What?”

  “I think I saw a match.”

  “Oh, God,” I moaned.

  “Shhhhh.”

  Even people who didn’t party knew what a match in the woods meant: Sr. Ordoñez. He was thought to go walking in the woods to bust people. He carried his little package of imported cigarettes with him, they said, and you could avoid him if you watched for his match.

  “What’re we going to do?”

  “Run!”

  “Are you kidding? And attract his attention for sure?”

  “I know. We’ll hide.”

  I looked around desperately. The woods were bare.

  “We’ll be munchkins!” one of the girls said in a muffled shriek.

  “Right!”

  “Quick!”

  “Down!”

  “Under the snow!”

  The girls were first. They lay on the snow and scooched around in it like huskies settling in for sleep. Then they scooped snow on top of themselves. Little mountains of snow piled up.

  “I can’t breathe!”

  Giggles and puffs of steamy breath floated up from the mounds like spirits out of fresh graves.

  I lay in the snow, too. I did not own a parka with a hood, nor was I wearing a hat. The snow nuzzled into my collar and melted down my neck. I felt it smash against the back of my Afro and work toward my scalp.

  “I gotta go,” I said. No one responded. I got up and shook myself. I do not remember whether anyone noticed my leaving or spoke to me. I only knew that I had to get out of the snow. It felt like a trap, like I’d be trapped for good. I had to get back to my house, back to my warm bed with my red-and-white afghan and the alarm clock ticking beside me.

  I came to a creek that burbled under its icy coating. To cross it, I had to traverse two logs laid lengthwise over the place where the creek dropped a foot to empty into the pond. I was not sure that I could negotiate the crossing, but I could not summon the resources to look for another. I stepped onto the logs. The crust of snow slipped off one log to reveal a thicker crust of ice. My foot plunged over the edge of the log toward the creek. I saw sharp rocks in the creek bed, and felt my calf scratch against the log.

  “You could die here,” I said to myself. “See those rocks? You could slip over and hit your head and die.”

  I sniveled with shame. I slipped and crawled and clawed my way over and ran when I got to the woods on the other side. Again, the voice inside chided me. “Running now? Couldn’t run back in the fall, when the sun was shining, and the ground was flat and the grass was green. Uh-unh. No. It was so hard to run, wasn’t it? Bet you’ll run now.”

  I’d sign up for Señor’s class next year, that’s what I’d do. So what if I was scared of him? Better to be scared of him in class than running away from him in the woods.

  Back in the house, the lights in the hallway blazed at me. For some reason, I wanted to see Janie, but she wasn’t there. I couldn’t think what to do next, so I walked along the third floor and back, and then down to the second floor and back. I ran into Mandy Butler, and I noticed, with some resentment, how attractive and petite she was, how at ease with other boys and girls.

  “I’m looking for Janie,” I said.

  “Janie? I think she may be down in Mr. Hawley’s,” Mandy said.

  “Oh.”

  “His door was open, and I heard voices. I bet he’s having a feed, or snacks or something.”

  “Oh. Maybe I’ll go down.” I did not feel capable of sitting with a ginger ale on Mr. Hawley’s rug and impersonating myself.

  Mandy peered at me. “Libby, are you OK?”

  “I don’t feel so hot. I just wanted to see Janie.” Why was I repeating myself?

  “Libby!” She got up close to me. “Libby, you are high!” Mandy Butler whooped. “That’s a riot! You are high. You are, aren’t you?” Tiny bubbles of spittle collected at the corners of her mouth.

  “I guess so. Please stop shouting.”

  “Oh, my God! This is a scream!”

  I turned to go down the steps.

  “Don’t go to Hawley’s.” She grabbed my elbow. “What are you doing? Use the back staircase. I can’t believe this.”

  When I got to my room, Pam Hudson popped her head in from next door. “Where have you been? I thought you were going to come back and study for English. I’ve been here grinding away waiting for company. Were you at the library or—”

  Pam’s voice, husky and full of good-natured scolding, filled me with blubbery remorse
.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Libby, what’s wrong?”

  “I’m sorry. You were here waiting for me, and I said I’d be back to study English, and I should have been studying English.” When the tears came, they burned my eyes, and I wondered why.

  “Aw, don’t get upset. Listen, don’t cry about it.” Pam could be big and maternal when she needed to be, what with that deep voice and those square white fingers and folksong-gray eyes. She came and sat next to me on the bed and put her arms around me. Pam always smelled as if she’d slept in her clothes, and I breathed in the scent of her, familiar and comforting as a sleeping bag. “Hey, look at me.

  “Libby? Libby! You are high.”

  “Oh, Christ, shut up, Pam.” You could talk to Pam like that sometimes.

  “Aw, Lib, now you’re going to have a crying jag.” She said it with true compassion even though she was laughing.

  “Jag” sounded like a bad word. I’d heard it before, and I knew what it meant. “I’ve got to wash my face,” I said, “and then we’ll study for English.”

  She looked at me and laughed outright. “Go the hell to bed,” she said.

  “I have to brush my teeth first.”

  “The hell with your teeth. It takes years to grow a cavity.”

  Pam threw my clothes into a heap. I lay down and allowed her to tuck me in. “Take it,” she said, as I tried to straighten my own bedclothes. “Just shut up for once and take it.” She rubbed me a little and turned out the light.

  “Pam,” I asked, feeling my stomach churning, “would you wind my clock and set it for six?”

  “What, are you crazy?”

  “No, really, please. I’ve got to get up early.”

  “OK,” she said in a singsong. “But don’t blame me if you end up losing another clock.” I’d ruined two clocks that year by chucking them across the room in my sleep. When I was sure Pam was gone, I listened to the ticking. It was like the loud tick-tock in my great-grandfather’s room. I thought how I would have disgraced him, disgraced my whole family, if I’d been caught, suspended, expelled. The other kids would apply to Andover or Exeter, no doubt, but I’d be back home, on my behind. When the alarm rang, I awoke to find my thumb in my mouth.

  Everyone was cleaning, girls filling and then overfilling trash cans with accumulated exam-week waste—papers, notebooks, hated texts, tissues, empty tampon and cookie boxes. I went to the refrigerator at the end of my short corridor to clear out my edibles: a dried-out piece of cheese that I refused to eat after some girl had had the temerity to nibble it, and the cold, miniature cans of pear nectar that my grandmother sent. (Pear nectar was never pilfered.)

  I felt a resentful regret as I passed a pair of skis leaning against the wall between the refrigerator and Sara’s room. I had lacked the money and the gumption to learn to ski that winter. Here I was in New Hampshire, and not learning to ski. I might never have another chance. I looked into Sara’s room and envied her her long, slim legs and feet, their strength and skill.

  I wished that I could be satisfied with what everyone said was a good, solid start at a St. Paul’s career, but I couldn’t. I wanted skills it took years to learn, experiences I would never have. I wanted to have what they had, just in case I needed it, like big vocabulary words.

  I seem to remember the cold, solid knowledge that caught me occasionally during adolescence that the seasons came and went according to the rhythm of nature. What I missed I would never chance on again; some things were final; some experiences could not be shared. I thought of a girl back home who had become pregnant the year before and had had an abortion. We corresponded, and I saw her when we were able, but it was hard to talk sometimes.

  “Oh, Libby, are you cleaning out the fridge?” Sara asked me. “It’s so gross when people forget to do that.”

  I thought of the janitor of our building, cleaning up our messes. “If you dirty it up,” my mother said, “best you clean it yourself. Nobody in this world was put here to wipe anybody else’s behind.”

  That is how I remember that night. I felt trapped, driven outside. I was certain that I could get free of the noise in my head if only I could get outside where the cold black sky shimmered with familiar constellations.

  But how certain can I be that on that particular night many years ago Sara actually did park her skis against the wall by the fridge? How certain that it was on that night and not one of a hundred other clear, cold New Hampshire nights that I went out to sit on the ice by myself? It was surely after my failed attempt to find relaxation in a pipe or to fit in with kids who played munchkins in the snow. I know that, because when I sat on the Lower School Pond, I thought of them—and of my shame at crashing through the iced-over creek bed, clumsy as a white man on an Indian trail. I know that it was before we went home, because when we returned in March the pond was thawing, and the ice was breaking up. And I know that the English exam was and is held near the end of examination week.

  Four years later, when I first read Shakespeare’s sonnet 64 in a college English class, I attached that sonnet in my mind to Sara’s skis and to the night I have just described. In that class, listening to my professor’s enunciation, as crisp and as promising as a brand-new hardback, I also thought about my friend’s abortion, or her pregnancy, rather, and the teal-colored autumn dusk when she told me.

  Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate

  That Time will come and take my love away.

  This thought is as a death, which cannot choose

  But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

  Those lines came back to me on St. Paul’s anniversary weekend in 1989, the weekend that marked my fifteenth reunion. They came to me after the annual parade, begun by the oldest alumnus riding a golf cart and ending with the current graduates, shouting and laughing and riding on each other’s shoulders. (My husband dubbed it the seven ages of man.) The same sonnet came back to me the next day when I sat on the dais with the other trustees, who were older, whiter, and wealthier than I, and watched the black and Hispanic students in their suits and white dresses file past to receive their diplomas and toss a smile my way or a thumbs-up.

  In this way I audit the layers of reminiscences, checking one against the other, mine against my schoolmates’. I trust the memory of my resentment of Sara’s slender legs, the joy of perfect equipoise on the balance beam, the milky taste of Ricky’s kisses. I trust the compassion a woman can feel for the girl she was. But it’s also true that my memory is a card shark, reshuffling the deck to hide what I fear to know, unable to keep from fingering the ace at the bottom of the deck even when I’m doing nothing more than playing Fish in the daylight with children.

  Still, I believe that after I cleared my foodstuffs from the fridge, I headed for the Lower School Pond. Behind me were the woods where I’d been the night before. In front of me the two Chapels jutted out of the snow: vigilant, haunted, and holy.

  I walked out onto ice so thick that during a skating party earlier that term we’d burned a bonfire on it. I slipped at first, but it came back to me to pull my weight up into my hips and balance it there, to relax my shoulders and knees. The ice seemed to get darker farther from the banks. I kept walking because this was, after all, a game of chicken, but also because I wanted to see where the ice would turn black.

  I had heard about black ice in the fall. Masters spoke of it with reverence. It figured prominently in nostalgic talk about the old days, back when St. Paul’s was the first high school in America to play ice hockey. The boys began their vigil in mid-November, hoping and praying for black ice, writing home about it.

  The phenomenon they looked for is a clear, glittering ice that forms when it gets cold enough before the first snow to freeze the dark waters of the lakes. The surface acts like a prism to break winter sun into a brilliant spectrum of browns. Below, in the depths, frozen flora pose. Black ice is the smoothest naturally occurring ice there is, as if nature were condescending to art.

 
; I went as far as the safety barrier, but not beyond. Tiny air pockets in the ice crackled under my boots. At the barrier I sat down on the ice, waiting for the cold dark to blow through and cleanse me. I wanted peace and clarity. I tried to think of Ricky, but other thoughts bubbled up. In a day we’d be boarding the buses, then the seven-hour train ride. Then I’d arrive at Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station, that welcoming palace with the bronze angel with two-story wings holding the railroad’s World War II dead in the form of a limp young man. Then home again to Yeadon, and the visits to my grandparents in New Jersey, and my family on Addison Street.

  The stillness did not quiet me; I disturbed it. The woods quickened around me as surely as dolls and statues and trees had come alive in the dark when I was a child. Cold as I was, dark ice chilling me from below as the air seeped into my clothes, my mind conjured up the memory of two hot rooms in West Philadelphia that always smelled of liniment and sometimes smelled of gin. I began to tell myself Pap’s old stories. They began in the black night, too.

  “Can you imagine how black? With not a light anywhere. So black and dark that women were sure to be home by nightfall, because they didn’t know what could be out there. And men, too. Big men rushed to get in out of the dark and in their homes—where I should have been, but I had stayed and stayed and stayed.…

  “But here, in this right hand, I carried a heavy stick, just in case. Cane grows up high, so I peered and peered trying to see, but there’s nothing to see in the narrow rows, in the dark, so I listened. I first knew it was there; I knew it; and then I heard it as a rustle.” He passed his fingers over the sheet and rubbed his dry feet together like the wings of a cricket. “Just a tiny rustle.

  “And I stopped and turned in the darkness to face it. Then I saw it in the moonlight, crouched down low—a white dog, white-white, and I heard the growl in its throat. I felt the sweat in the small of my back. It moved toward me. I took that stick and threw! Hard as I could, I threw it.”

  He heaved into the air, shaking the bed down to its squeaky springs. When the bed was still, he growled out, with a voice held over from his once broader and younger chest: