Black Ice Page 13

  “And it screamed! It screamed like a woman, and the moment it screamed, I felt the pain, felt it as if that cudgel had come back and struck me there, on my shoulder.” Pap guided my hand over a knot of bone on his shoulder, like a fossil embedded in stone. “That was there the next morning when I woke up, and it’s been there ever since.”

  I rubbed the knot each time to see if it had disappeared, or if the love in my hand might dissolve it.

  “ ‘Poor Henry felt his blood run cold/At what before him stood—’ ”

  “ ‘Yet like a man he did resolve,’ ” I answered him, “ ‘to do the best he could.’ ”

  Pap nodded his approval at my recitation. Then he continued: “I learned,” he said, “that some things thrive in the dark. One man, Horace, I think his name was, Horace and his wife were getting ready for bed, when a knock came on the door. The door was already shut for the night, and they had, like we all had, a heavy piece of wood that went across to lock it. So Horace called through the door, who was it? And a pitiful voice answered, the voice of a woman who had gotten caught out late and wondered if there was a man in the house to walk her home, just up the road, but she was sooooo frightened. So Horace told her to wait there, and he started to pull on his pants. And then, he was just lifting the bolt off the door, and his wife, it was, said to him, ‘Horace, you better take your gun.’

  “And then they heard it screech: ‘Hah-haaaaaah!’ the thing outside the door screamed. ‘Your wife saved you!’

  “Your wife saved you.” He repeated the sentence again in a wee, small voice and laughed to himself.

  We never said exactly what it was that was outside the door, but I had no doubt that it was a witch, some vengeful, rapacious spirit. I imagined that the spirits were always women, like the one who slipped out of her skin at night and flew around in the darkness. She left her skin draped over a chair by the window, as easily as others leave their lingerie. When her husband realized what was happening, he went to an old woman in the village and asked how he could keep his wife home with him, where she belonged. The old woman told him to pretend to be asleep that night and wait until his wife was gone. Then he was to take salt and rub it on the inside of her skin. So he did. Just before the following dawn, when the sky began to lighten a little, but the moon still shone white and silver through the window, the husband heard the rustling and then a shriek of pain as the wife tried to slip back in. “Skin, skin,” she screamed, “ya na know me?”

  I knew the stories so well that I daydreamed sometimes when he told them. I fell into a reverie in which I escaped from the city into a green wood, carrying with me my younger cousin and sister. It would be cold and clear in my fantasy, and the children would have to walk hard to keep up. I’d carry them toward the end, one in the front, the other on my back, until we reached a cave I knew, where we’d shelter from the cold. I’d build a fire to warm us, and keep us there, safe and quiet and gentle. I’d never beat them, and we’d grow up together, simple and strong.

  At other times, I’d remember Grammom and her soft, salty food: The c’coo she made, a tomato-base fish stew, cooked so long that you could crunch the bones, poured over a green porridge of cornmeal and okra. Her kitchen had felt safe like my cave, safe from the women who now ran the family.

  Now that Grammom was dead, Pap seemed to have lost his link to the women downstairs. He was Man to them, the only steadfast, ever-present man in their lives, as much symbol as flesh. He fixed things still, blind as he was, feeling the rotten wood where a screw no longer caught and fingering through an old tool box for a longer screw, the proper screwdriver and putty. But the family had grown out of his stories. Their womanhood seemed to be a taking off from the world of men below: as surely as they worked and worried to get a man and then build a home and a bed in it with him, so too did they seem eager to fly away. I had no doubt that if they could have, my mother and her sisters and my grandmother would have left their skins draped like pantyhose over their unsatisfactory furniture and floated up above us all: the men who never failed to oppress them; the children who’d ruined their beautiful bodies; and the boxy little houses fit to bursting with the leftover smells of their cooking and the smoke from their cigarettes, curling up and hanging just above our heads like ambition.

  Pap withdrew from their magic womanhood, even as he praised it. Marrying them off, he said, was like throwing “pearls before swine.” We said it to each other as we looked at the yellowing newspaper clippings of my twin aunts at twenty, caught by an admiring photographer at some social function or another, in identical broad-brimmed hats and fur-trimmed jackets.

  If they allowed him to withdraw, however, and to ossify into a family icon, certainly he himself had taught them how and why: “There’s a man whose daughter is standing at the top of some steps,” he began, “and the child’s name is Izzy. Now the father told the girl to jump down the steps, jump down to where he was. ‘Jump, Izzy, jump,’ he said. ‘Papa’s got you. Papa’ll catch you.’

  “But she’s scared. ‘I’ll fall, Papa,’ she says.

  “But he answers her, his voice so gentle, so strong: ‘Papa wouldn’t let you fall. Don’t be afraid. Come on, now, jump, Izzy, jump.’

  “Finally the child gathers up her courage and jumps. She leaps toward her daddy’s arms—and her father, he steps aside. The child falls, of course. She falls down on that hard ground, and it hurts. She’s scraped herself, and it hurts. Her daddy helps her up and dries her tears, and she cries to him and cries and asks him, ‘Papa, why didn’t you catch me, Papa? Why did you let me fall? You said to jump, Papa, and I jumped.’

  “And he says to her, ‘Listen to me, Izzy, and listen carefully. ‘Learn this this once and never forget: Trust no man.’ ”

  We learned the lesson and whispered it into each other’s ears like poison. “Jump, Izzy, jump,” we said when one of us fell short, and then we laughed the grim, hysterical laughter of caretakers whom no one took care of.

  I remembered Izzy and fashioned for myself the perfect pose. That was it. That was what I’d been trying to remember these months at St. Paul’s School, the pose: I would be well-mannered, big-hearted, defiant, and, because a pose cannot resist great intimacy, at the center of all my posing, I would remain alone. I would trust no man.

  • • •

  I got up from where I sat, walked a little farther out onto the ice, and then circled round the pond and made my way to the bank. I was warm with exertion and reverie. Comforted by the old, familiar fears, I could go back again to face the new ones.

  It did not occur to me that the ice I had been sitting on might not be the black ice I’d heard about. It wasn’t. Black ice is an act of nature as elusive as grace, and far more rare. I did not learn about either until much later.

  Chapter Eight

  When I arrived home for spring break in March, no one else I knew in the Delaware Valley was on vacation. I felt as isolated in our home as a young housewife. I ate and slept and did housecleaning during the day. I also daydreamed, listened to the radio, and walked from room to room twirling my baton and smiling vacantly at familiar objects.

  One day Mr. Hawley’s end-of-term letter arrived with my grades. I had failed calculus. It seemed to him that I “simply met a difficult course … and did not really recognize this.” He went on: “Thus, she did not try new methods of studying … such as extensive extra help. Mr. Shipman feels that she can pass calculus in the spring term if she takes some realistic steps in the studying of the course.”

  The rest of the groupmaster’s report described my work at school as “excellent.” Mr. Hawley wrote about gymnastics, the house play, my term on Student Council, and my other courses. The failing calculus paragraph, however, was longer than the everything-else-is-great paragraph. I felt aggrieved that he had not even mentioned my first High Honors in English; he had not even mentioned my other four Honors.

  “The man says he thinks you can pass,” my mother said in answer to my frustration.

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p; “I don’t want to ‘pass.’ ” It was hard not to spit the words out onto the kitchen table. “I didn’t go up there to ‘pass.’ ”

  I dared not say that I would almost prefer to fail outright than to scramble on my hands and knees for a P. The fact was, I wanted calculus to disappear. I wanted to drop it, reasoning that since I had taken one course more than was required, I had one to spare, so to speak.

  The Vice-Rector disagreed. I would have to gather the strength to hurl myself at it once more. It was a two-term course. I could still pull it off. If only I could stand the pain of not understanding a little longer, the magic would happen. Understanding concepts was magic. It could come in drips or a glorious flood, but I couldn’t tell. I had to keep studying and hold on. That was the hard part. Not understanding made me want to explode after a time. I promised myself that it would come like a difficult reading suddenly came, and then I’d have it.

  It would happen as my father described falling in judo: “It’s almost like religion,” he said. “It’s learning not to fight it. If you fight the fall, you lose. You always lose. But if you can just conquer the fear, you won’t get hurt. You just fall.”

  We returned for mud season. The ponds were thawing. Water roared over the man-made fall by Simpson’s front door. It foamed over the rocks and swelled the grass meadow below the quad. The paths were gritty with layers of sand that the grounds crew had spread over the winter ice. Grit and sand and mud encrusted the soles of our shoes. Tiny cylinders of dried mud popped from the eyelets and onto the floor when I laced my shoes.

  Mountains of snow by the sides of the roads did not melt. The sun warmed them; the nights froze them; and they grew as hard and shiny as boils. Unexpected snows caught us by surprise at night, and freezing rains came suddenly, coating the trees and their tentative buds as if with shrink-wrap.

  Despite setbacks, the buds on the tough little magnolia by the Schoolhouse fattened tenaciously inside their fuzzy pods, and the chickadees, their furry black-and-white feathers puffed against the wind, proceeded with their special springtime noise. It was a soft, surprisingly mammalian sound, delightful and disturbing. I, who was sometimes surprised myself these days by the sound of my own words (phrases and pronunciation I had worked to master now fell from my mouth spontaneously), I listened to these funny birds who did not sound like birds as if they could illuminate a mystery for me. They could not.

  I continued to flail about in calculus. I cursed myself for ever having signed up for it. I cursed my teacher and made nasty jokes about him at table. I completed my homework assignments with grim determination, and emerged from each one as baffled as I had begun. I was just beginning to understand the ideas from the winter term, and it was already spring. I whipped myself into to a frenzy, hoping that pressure and panic would hasten learning, but with each new lesson, I fell further behind.

  Grace’s older brother was assigned to tutor me, and then I was released from classes altogether. “I am not sure that this will work,” Mr. Shipman told me, “but at this point, I’m ready to try.”

  Four times a week I met with my tutor or with Mr. Shipman alone. Having escaped from the daily humiliation of class, I confused relief with progress. I remained just as far behind, only I didn’t know it.

  I chose crew for my spring sport. An old master named Mr. Church took us new girls out to the Lower School boat docks to learn the basics: how to get the boat off its shelf, down the dock, and into the water; how to step into the boat and strap our feet into the stirrups; how to position our oars in the oarlocks and where to grip the smooth butt of the oar. He taught us port from starboard, how deep to dip our oars into the water and how high to carry them when we pulled them out. Mr. Church had been in the Lower School for years, and he was as gentle with us as with twelve-year-olds.

  Once we learned how to get the boat into the water without ruining the shell or hurting ourselves, he led us into the calm water. We rowed clumsily, scooping deep into the water or glancing the surface. At the beginning of the term we rocked and rolled. Chunks of ice floated by silently.

  Once we knew the basics, they took us away from Mr. Church. Now we ran out to Big Turkey Pond, a mile from the gym. I detoured through the forest behind Upper to find a shortcut. I negotiated fallen trees and mud and moss. I took my occasional falls as just punishment for chiseling, and I chiseled nonetheless.

  Sometimes I stopped running because I was tired, and because the woods were too animated to pound through as I was pounding through adolescence. Each day the snow retreated a little from the coldest, shadiest places. The mud softened, and the path became more treacherous. I came to know the working chipmunk holes, sunny bird roosts, and squirrels’ nests, bulky as winter hats in the high branches of the hardwood trees.

  My guilty afternoon pleasure made me greedy for more that spring, and so I left off studying now and then to read a short story or a poem that was not assigned or to skip the first half of Seated Meal so that I could steal away to the Lower School docks to watch the sunset melt into the tops of the pines.

  I did not know that I was supposed to find in such solitary diversions moments of joy in learning so profound that I would cherish them into adulthood. I would have laughed just as my four-year-old daughter laughed when I told her that children grow while they sleep.

  Ricky wrote to invite me for a weekend at his school. Over and over I asked where I’d be staying. I wanted a safe room, tucked far away, if possible, in an inaccessible den of some vigilant faculty member. That arranged, I came upon my inspiration for the term.

  In biology lab someone mentioned a theory that the body needed as little as three hours to accomplish the daily physiological functions of sleep. About the same time I picked up another factoid, namely, that most people use only a small fraction—five or ten percent—of their brain capacity. It was like finding money in the road. I was so excited that I told everyone at the lunch table. They took the idea and worked it into a routine.

  “You do the experiment, and then come back and tell us how it went,” said Kenny.

  “I gotta see this.”

  “Zombie time.”

  “She’ll be sleeping standing up, like horses do.”

  Somebody made snoring sounds.

  “Nah, guys, it’s gonna be like this,” said Anthony. He, too, was from Philadelphia. He was a tall, bulky boy who liked to tell stories and joke. “She doesn’t half study anyhow, so what’s the difference? You’re gonna walk into class and do the same thing. No. Don’t try to deny it. Check it out. This is how it is in creative writing—” Anthony pitched his voice to a high falsetto. “ ‘Excuse me, Mr. Ball, but I think with regard to the reading, uh, Life is like a leaf.’

  “And Mr. Ball says: ‘Now, let’s think about the possibilities. Did the rest of you hear that? Repeat that please.’ ”

  “I never said that!”

  “Get out of here,” Anthony said. “I was there. I know.”

  After lunch it was time for practice, and since they’d warmed to teasing me, they teased me some more about crew. The boys had come up with an entire routine about crew, which opened with their whistling an old sailing song that was featured on a TV commercial for men’s cologne. “Yeah, matey!” they said in unison. “Matey” was acceptable public shorthand for “faggot,” a term they used frequently. “Down brothers” did not row crew. Crew was effete. It did not translate perfectly in the case of a girl, but (or maybe therefore) they ragged me anyway. Then we went off to our separate sports: they to track and lacrosse, and I to skulk through the woods to the distant boat-houses.

  I watched the back of the girl in front of me and moved my body with hers. The oars dipped, and I listened to the sound in order to hit the rhythm. Crouch and pull. Make the pull smooth, hard, long as you could. The trick was to hit a balance between thinking and not thinking. Once I’d gotten the oar into the water just right, I had to stop thinking about it and put my arms just there again, pull just so hard with my back, slide with just the s
ame force from my thighs and calves. It took thinking about each part, and then letting go of the thought so that the parts could work together. Now and then I hit the balance. My body moved, and my mind was clear, focused on nothing but the rhythm and the sounds of the oars, the repetition, and Patty Glovsky’s voice shouting hoarsely: Stroke! Stroke! Stroke! Wood and metal and water made their own sounds, and we were silent.

  I was always astonished at the end of practice at how little I had thought of my romance. Running back to the gym, on the road, if I was not able to slip into the woods unnoticed, or on the dappled trail, I did think of Ricky. I thought of his skin, his nostrils, and his mouth. Some days I could not put the features together and see his face in my mind.

  When I visited his school, that forgetfulness amazed me. Ricky had prepared for my stay: He’d found a fancy bicycle for me. He explained its features and adjusted the seat. Together we rode on sloping roads that wound through the countryside near his school. We scrambled over hills and sped down, our pedals flying through tenth gear. We sliced through shadows, and I tilted my head to keep my eyes from tearing in the wind.

  We rode about fifteen miles before I braved the disappointment that I knew I’d see in Ricky’s eyes when I said I’d had enough. We rode back to his school underneath canopies of green trees, talking of bicycle design and our love.

  “Well, what shall we do now?” Ricky asked me.

  I wanted a bath, but that didn’t seem the right answer, so I smiled and asked what he would like to do. Ricky took me on a tour of the campus and introduced me to friends. Then we ended up in the gymnasium, where we shot baskets. It was high time I learned to play basketball, we decided, and he tried to find my natural shot. We tried lay-ups, jump shots, set shots, free throws.

  We meandered in search of yet more athletic equipment. Finding rackets, we played a little tennis and then went to dinner at the cafeteria. Dinner was clattery, noisy, informal, and followed hard on by the school dance. The inevitable man-sized speakers blasted out the inevitable rock music. It was violent music, and the dancing took on the aspect of hand-to-hand combat. We danced as best we could, but the music was against us, and elbows were flying. We left early. After cycling, basketball, and tennis, my thighs had begun to cramp anyway.