As Simple as Snow (12 page)

thanksgiving

Christmas has the Grinch and Scrooge. Thanksgiving has my father. He hates it. It doesn’t make sense, I know; I mean, what is there to hate? There’s food and football, and both in abundant quantities, but he hates it anyway. Usually it wasn’t so bad, because there would be enough people around that his bah-humbug behavior didn’t stand out so much, and if he wasn’t complaining, he was holed away in his den and we wouldn’t give him another thought. My brother would cook the turkey. It’s something he started in college. He and his friends would come and cook a big traditional Thanksgiving dinner at our house. Paul continued even after he married, but he and his family were not coming this year. They were staying down in Baton Rouge.

We went to the club. My father was a member of the country club in Hilliker, and that’s where we wound up for the holiday. It had a large ballroom, with enough tables to hold a few hundred people. All the tables had white cloths draped over them and an arrangement of dried flowers in the center. Almost every table had eight people, or ten, or more, large families laughing and eating and enjoying themselves. It was just the three of us at our table, sitting silently by ourselves.

The ballroom looked out across the golf course, covered now in a few feet of snow. My father stood at one of the floor-to-ceiling windows and stared out into the snow, then finally sat down with his back to the window. I’m surprised he didn’t go out with a shovel and clear the course, just so he wouldn’t have to eat with us.

The waiters and waitresses, in starched white shirts, wheeled a turkey right to your table and carved it with a showy flourish; they also brought huge platters of mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and green beans. There was a buffet where you could fill up on appetizers, soup and salad, bread, cheese, and dessert. It was a ton of food, and it was all good. My mother and I made trips to the buffet, but my father never left his seat. He sat and drank his scotch and had a look on his face like he had a big ball of mashed potatoes stuck in his throat. Men came and said hello to him, guys he golfed with or did business with, and he responded with a few words, but he never introduced my mother or me, and he kept the conversation as brief as possible. I didn’t know anyone there until I saw Billy Godley enter with his family, a big group of parents and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents. His father was a cop, a detective, and that wasn’t the best for Billy. Kids made fun of him at school. He hung out with the geeks on the second floor. He was small and skinny too, which didn’t help. Billy was nice enough, but I wasn’t about to go talk to him. The two Velveetas weren’t going to have Thanksgiving dinner together.

“It’s good turkey,” I said to my mother. “Don’t you think?”

“It is good. Not as good as your brother’s, but it’s good.”

“Maybe we can get him to cook one at Christmas.” Paul had promised to come for Christmas. I didn’t think I could survive if he didn’t come.

My father was ready to go while we were still eating. “Have some coffee,” my mother told him. He got up from the table and wandered off. My mother and I went and got dessert. I think I had three pieces of pie. Still, it took only a little more than an hour to have Thanksgiving dinner.

Before we left I went to the bathroom. Someone had thrown up in one of the stalls, missing the toilet, and the chunks were all over the floor. There was the smell of vinegar and fresh-baked bread, the kind of smell that immediately stops you from breathing. I wondered if it had been my father.

He was sitting in the car. Just sitting. He didn’t have the radio on, he didn’t even have the heat on.

 

 

 

When we got home he made a beeline to his den, and my mother made a pot of coffee for herself. I tried calling Anna, but she must not have had her phone on. I sent her a text message and waited to hear from her. She and her parents had gone out of town for the day, to visit relatives or something; I don’t think she ever really said.

My brother called later that night. He talked to my mother for a while and then asked to talk to me.

“So how horrible was it?”

“It was all right,” I said. “Not as good as when you cook.”

“I’m sorry to do that to you this year.”

“That’s all right. You’ve got the baby and everything.”

“We’ll come up for Christmas.”

“That’ll be good,” I said. It was all done with anyway. I didn’t think the day had been so horrible, and at that minute I didn’t really care whether they came up for Christmas or not. If you’d asked me a couple of hours before, like when I was standing in the puke-covered bathroom, I would have cared. But right then I was more interested in looking at my phone and seeing if Anna was going to contact me that night. She didn’t.

 

 

 

The next day, Anna and I went sledding. She showed up at my house wearing black jeans and boots and her long black coat. I made her change into a pair of raspberry-colored coveralls of my mother’s. She hadn’t worn them in years. “Everything’s going to get wet otherwise,” I said. It was going to be a warm day, maybe even above freezing. I had on a pair of ski pants, and Anna asked me if I skied. “I know how,” I said. “Maybe we can go sometime.”

“Don’t push your luck,” she said. “I’ll be lucky if I survive sledding.” She came out of the bathroom and looked at the coveralls and said, “Can we go somewhere where there aren’t any other people?”

There was a great sledding hill about five minutes from my house, just north on Lincoln Road, but everybody went there. So we walked east, down Valley View Road and then up Brook Road, with me dragging the two-person toboggan along the sidewalk. My brother and sister had used the same toboggan when they were little. It was still in good shape, although the padding had seen better days. It hissed as it skidded across the snow-covered lawns. The sky was cloudy and the air thick and moist. Sidewalks and streets were clearing as the snow melted, but the curbs were still piled with snow that had been pushed into dirty mounds by plows and browned by sand. I almost wished it would snow again to cover it all up and make it clean. Every once in a while we could hear sheets of snow slide down someone’s roof and hit the ground with a muffled thump. The daytime warmth wouldn’t last, though; everything would freeze again in the night.

We walked from Brook Road into the woods, and had to take a breather at the top of the steep hill. There was no one around, not even traffic on the road. A couple of hills here had been cleared in the past, for electric wires or something else that never came about, and they made for good sledding. It wasn’t as good as the Ashton hill, but it was good enough, and it wasn’t crowded like Ashton. My brother was the only other person I knew who had come up here. It’s where he brought me sledding when I was little.

A white slide stretched down before Anna and me, a wide trough of snow, bordered by thick trees. The trick was to stay in the middle of the slide, and not go into the woods.

Anna turned around and said, “This isn’t going to wind up like
Ethan Frome,
is it?”

I didn’t know what she was talking about. It was one of those references of hers that was lost on me.

“Forget it,” she said.

“I’m not smart enough for you,” I said.

“You’re fine.”

“I’m a simpleton. I’m simple, like snow.”

It was a joke. I meant it to be clever, but she was off again on one of her explanations and investigations, ignoring my point. “Snow isn’t simple at all,” she said. “It only looks that way. It’s actually very complicated.” She looked at me and laughed. “I can’t help myself.” She came over and kissed me with her cold mouth. It was like electricity. “I say stupid things sometimes.”

“I’ve never heard you say anything stupid.”

“I’m a freak,” she said. “I should just keep quiet. Be more like you.”

“I should be more like you.”

 

 

 

She wanted to take a run by herself. I watched her slide slowly off the hill and then quickly gain speed as she made the descent. She was fine at first, staying in the middle of the hill, following in the flattened path we had made together, but then, just before the dip of the hill, where it started to level off, she swerved toward the woods, disappearing from my view. She might have hit a bump or leaned the wrong way and lost control of the sled, but it almost looked like she wanted to go into the trees. I waited a few minutes for her to come back out into sight. She didn’t come. I waited a little more and began to think that maybe she had hit a tree. I ran down the hill, stumbling and falling into the snow. I followed the path of the sled and raced into the woods, expecting the worst.

I was sweating and covered in snow and out of breath by the time I reached the trees. The cold air stung my lungs, and my breath shot out in cloudy bursts. Anna was lying on the ground on her back, her raspberry arms stretched straight above her head, her legs also stuck straight out. She had been making an angel in the snow. I started laughing at her.

“I could be dead,” she said, “smashed against one of these trees. What would you do then?”

“Leave you here and go on home and act as if it never happened.”

“You would do that?”

“I suppose I could bury you first, but no one would find you for a long time.”

“You would just leave me?” She sat up and made room for me to sit beside her on the toboggan. Her eyes flickered, and I thought she might be enjoying herself.

“People might think it was my fault.”

“It would have been your fault.”

“I wasn’t on the sled.”

“You brought me here and then killed me and left me in the woods. That’s how they would see it. Just think how sad my parents would be, and you just left me here. It serves you right. You better not bury me in the woods. I’ll come back and torment you.”

“Just come back,” I said.

“Do you think I could?”

“If anybody can, it’s you.”

“But what if I couldn’t come back, what if I could only reach you through somebody else, like a psychic or a medium?”

“I wouldn’t recognize you.”

“That’s why we need a code, or something only the two of us know, something you can recognize,” she said.

“Why do you think it’s you that’s going to be gone first?”

“
You
didn’t almost hit a tree.”

“And what would our code be?”

“Something simple,” she said. “Something as simple as snow. That phrase: ‘Something as simple as snow.’”

“You’re making fun of me.”

“It’s easy to remember,” she said.

“It’s not really a code.”

“It’s a secret message. It’s a signal. It means the message is coming from one of us. That’s a code.”

“So we start the message with that phrase?”

“That’s what Houdini and his wife did.”

“What was their phrase?”

“It had a name in it, and then words that corresponded to letters in the alphabet. It spelled out the word ‘believe.’ The phrase was something like, ‘Rosabelle, answer tell pray-answer look tell answer-answer tell.’”

“Was Rosabelle his wife?”

“No, it was from a song.”

“Why don’t we use that, then?”

“Because it was theirs—it doesn’t mean anything to us. Besides, you don’t want to use Houdini’s code—what if he’s still using it?”

“What does our code mean to us?”

She didn’t miss a beat. “It means that we know something no one else does. It means that everyone else thinks the world is simple, but it’s not. It’s like snow—most people think that it’s just white, but if you look at it, really observe it, you’ll see that there are different shades, from a sort of grayish white to a brilliant white. This book I read,
The Worst Journey in the World
—about Scott’s last expedition to the South Pole—described the snow as cobalt blue, rose, mauve, and lilac, with gradations of all of those colors. And then there’s texture. Some snow is dry and granular, almost like sugar, while other snow is wet and clumpy. And that’s just the superficial stuff—once you start looking at each flake it gets really complicated.”

“Maybe you’re making it more complicated than it really is,” I said. “Maybe it’s a myth about the uniqueness of snowflakes. Everybody thinks that no two snowflakes are alike, because they’ve never really been compared.” I scooped up a handful of snow and shook off some of the excess for effect. “Maybe I’m holding in my hand right now the very same sort of flakes, identical in every way, as some guy in Tibet or Switzerland or Iceland or Iowa is holding at the very same instant. But he thinks his are unique and I think mine are unique because we have no way to catalogue and compare them. And that’s just the snow that’s on the ground right now, what about last year’s snow and the year before that? You have billions and billions of flakes that would need to be compared.”

She laughed. She laughed at me. “You just proved my point. Think how complicated it would be to catalogue all the individual snowflakes and then try and compare them. They can’t even do that with fingerprints, and there’s only a tiny fraction of those compared with all the snowflakes in any given winter, let alone all winters.”

 

 

 

A freezing rain clicked through the trees and we headed toward home. Instead of trudging back up the hill and then walking down the road, we cut through the woods. By the time we reached Brook Road, the trees were shiny with a thin layer of ice. I wanted Anna to stay at my house for a while, but she changed her clothes to leave. “I’ll take your shortcut,” she said.

“Be careful.”

“I’ll call you when I get home.”

A half-hour passed and I hadn’t heard from her. I called her house and Mrs. Cayne told me that she wasn’t home yet. “When did she leave?” she asked.