Glaciers (2 page)

In her old apartment, on the top floor of a ninety-year-old house, these things do not look out of place, but as she gazes at them, Isabel realizes that these things were all new, once. They were purchased and carried home in boxes or department
store shopping bags. Perhaps they were given as gifts. Their value was their newness, once, and none of these things would have gone together in a kitchen of any decade before now. A new bride would have wanted a set of matching china, complete with serving platters and gravy boats. The rooster and hen of the 1940s would have looked hopelessly old-fashioned next to the bright geometric-print linens of the 1960s. The hand-sewn aprons would have been folded away in a drawer or hung on the back of the door, not displayed as if they were objects to be admired.

But Isabel does admire these things. She feels a need to care for them that goes beyond an enduring aesthetic appreciation. She loves them like adopted children.

 

She butters a piece of toast, pours a cup of tea, and spoons some honey. Her mother had a way
of stirring honey into tea—counterclockwise four times, then clockwise once—that Isabel has practiced since she was a little girl. There was something in the angle of her mother's wrist and the calm, distant gaze out the kitchen window that made her seem younger, prettier. Isabel realizes now that she had been seeing through her mother, to the woman she had been before she and Agnes were born.

She takes a bite of toast and sits at the table with her breakfast. The cat rubs herself against Isabel's bare legs. Out the window, a single crow swoops and rests on the telephone line, silently. The line dips and sways. Isabel sips her tea and stares at the bird against the pale morning sky, thoughts drifting from crow, to dream, to dress, to what she will wear today (the brown skirt with the kick pleats, she thinks, and the dark blue White Stag blouse she found in Astoria last summer).

The crow drops from the line, sails away.

Afterlife

She was four, not yet in school, when her father first took her junking. It began with biscuits and gravy at the High Tide Diner in Old Kenai, a few blocks of nearly dilapidated clapboard buildings with pitted and rocky parking lots overlooking the delta of the Kenai River and Cook Inlet. The waitresses, whose regulars were leathery from cigarettes and the sea, or missing fingers from the canneries, fussed over the young father and his plump, blue-eyed little girl who liked to stand inside the vinyl booth and look back into the room through the mirrors along the walls. (What she saw: the
backs of old men smoking at the counter; the soda fountain; the waitresses sorting flatware and pouring coffee; the little window where the plates of food came out of the kitchen; and the most peculiar thing, on the wall above the cash register, a photograph of Mount Redoubt varnished to an enormous piece of driftwood, with hands that ticked around an invisible clock.)

After breakfast they climbed back into her father's rusty orange Chevy pickup and took an unpaved back road to the Salvation Army Thrift Store. Isabel's father flipped through bins of records and she wandered around, looking for treasures.

There are treasures everywhere, her father told her.

What kind of treasures? she asked.

All kinds. Like this, he said, grinning, holding up a record with a picture of a woman covered from head to toe in whipped cream.

Oh, Isabel said, unsure if this was actually proof.

Belly, he said, putting the record down on his stack and squatting next to her, it's a treasure if you love it. It doesn't matter how much it costs, or whether anyone else wants it. If you love it, you will
treasure
it, does that make sense?

Yes, she said, though it was still unclear. She loved biscuits and gravy. She loved watching snow fall. She loved to swing so high her toes seemed to brush the tops of the trees.

Her father went back to the records and Isabel looked around her. They were the only customers in the store. An elderly woman hobbled from the back with an armload of scarves. Isabel set off in the opposite direction, passing racks of men's clothes, shelves of pots and pans, bins of weathered sports equipment.

Along the way she stopped, pointed to objects and turned back to her father asking, Daddy, do I
love this hat? Do I love this jar? Daddy, do I love this snowshoe?

I don't know, Belly, do you? her father replied, every time.

Eventually she lost sight of him and continued to wander through the store. She climbed onto a stool by the cash register, where there was a glass case full of jewelry and knickknacks. She peered through the glass at the pendants and rings and ceramic figures—a pair of cats, a shepherdess, an elaborately decorated woman's shoe that would fit into Isabel's palm.

Then she noticed a shoe box on top of the counter, full of old photographs. Most of them were black and white, some on stiff cardboard with names and dates she couldn't read written on the backs. She picked up one, then another, looking carefully at the people, especially their expressions and clothes. She took in the whole box with her
small fingers and serious gaze. There were children with buttoned boots and unsmiling fixed faces. Young women in lacy dresses, holding bouquets of flowers, colors faded. Family portraits in front of houses and cars, and one with a horse. There were entire families there, dispossessed, thrown together like refugees.

They must be lonely, she thought, and scared, all night in the cold, quiet shop.

She carefully sorted through them until she found the few she must save. Among them: two little blonde girls, probably sisters, posed in matching dresses with big bows and lace-up boots; a young man in a military uniform, in front of a white farmhouse; and a sad-looking young woman in a pale flowered dress and sunhat, sitting in the tall grass by the sea.

What did you find, Belly? her father asked when he found her.

These people, she said, holding out her pictures, fanning them a little, like playing cards.

Those are pretty old, aren't they? he said, looking them over. He looked up at her. Well, now you know what treasures are, he told her.

 

She took them home and asked for a special box to put them in. Her mother found an orange pekoe tin in the back of the kitchen cupboard and tapped the tea dust from it over the sink.

For years Isabel kept the tin of pictures in her sock and underwear drawer, taking them out every now and then when she was alone. She invented stories for the people, based mostly on bits of other stories she gleaned from her grandmother's cribbage friends.

One of the sisters died, at nineteen, of the Spanish flu. The other grew up to be the girl in the grass by the sea, who was the young soldier's sweetheart. The
soldier lost his mind in the trenches; his sweetheart never married. She sold fabric and notions in the general store and kept the bundle of her soldier's letters in her delicates drawer next to a ring box containing a lock of her sister's hair.

She carried the photographs with her from year to year and from house to house, after her parents' divorce, when she was ten. Then again, when she was eleven, and her mother moved to New Mexico with the man she met in a photography class, and her father moved with the girls to Portland. The people in the photographs came to mean as much to her as her own relatives. She had rescued them in Alaska, the only home she had ever known. She imagined them watching over her from the afterlife, grateful. That first lonely summer in Portland, before school started, she would climb the maple in her new yard and look out through the branches into the neighborhood, trying to imagine a time
when her own existence, her clothes and hairstyle, and the saturated colors of their family snapshots, would be antique. Already her memories of Alaska were taking on the patina of relics; life in the city was transforming Isabel—from the sounds and the lights to the architecture and the way people dressed. Change was inevitable, but she could not imagine what the future might look like, or what her place might be in it. All she could do was hope she did not end up in a shoe box at a Salvation Army Thrift Store.

City Trees

Downtown in the morning, everyone moving, the trees listing, the bricks and green speckled with pigeons and starlings. Isabel steps off the bus and onto the sidewalk. She moves more quickly than she would like, in the fresh air, drawn along by all the other moving bodies. Shoes clicking and clapping around her. Suits and leather satchels brushing past, disappearing through glass doors, into tall buildings. Trains stopping and starting. The bus pulling away from the curb with a raspy cough.

A few yellow ginkgo leaves flutter from a tree, and Isabel watches them eddy around the elk statue
and into the fountain below. No one else seems to notice, moving so quickly up the sidewalks.

Isabel thinks of Amsterdam. She wonders what kind of leaves fell into the young man's hat. Amsterdam, like Portland, is full of trees. Elms and planes: old giants, planted like soldiers in long rows along avenues and in city squares. Most of the trees of Amsterdam were planted after the war, when almost all of the trees and much of the city were destroyed. Isabel remembers the passage in Anne Frank's diary, about glimpses of a chestnut tree and the sky, hemmed by a small window. Anne's tree survived the war, but Isabel read in the newspaper recently that it is rotting from within, and there was talk of cutting it down.

Isabel lifts her gaze to the umbrella of leaves overhead, framed by the tall buildings. Dutch elms and London plane trees among the ginkgos.

Chestnut leaves would be too big to fit into a hat, she thinks.

Isabel waits for the light, shuddering with the easterly breeze at an intersection, skirt clinging to her bare legs, skin prickling all over. She clutches her sweater to her. The people around her become rigid while the breeze weaves through them, some turning into it, some away. As the light changes, the breeze shifts the leaves, and the sun warms her again. She steps off the curb into the street and hastens her pace to the library.

The Wounded

Isabel turns the metal knob on her office door and pushes until she feels the thump of the door against her chair. She glances at the cart of books in the hallway outside her door: the wounded. All day Isabel presides over the library's damaged books, which, ironically, requires lots of paperwork.

But she actually loves her job. She abandoned writing for library science in college, at the urging of her grandmother, who claimed there was no market for
being in love with words
. Isabel chose her area of specialty, preservation and conservation, as a minor
rebellion and as a matter of course: salvaging the mistreated came naturally to her, though it might not be the most
marketable
skill she could acquire.

She drops her bag on her desk then pulls off her sweater, hanging it over the back of her chair, and listens for sounds of habitation around her. She likes arriving early, settling in before everyone else arrives.

Up and down the hall are other small offices and meeting rooms for others like her: the subspecialists, the techies, the genealogists, the archivists. The librarians work upstairs, in larger, brighter, carpeted rooms, with newer computers and more comfortable chairs. This part of the basement was once a bomb shelter; her office was once a mop closet.

You work in the secret underground! her best friend, Leo, exclaimed the first time he visited her at work.

Then he told her about the sewers in comic books—the kind inhabited by acid-drenched humans
and the bitter, discarded former pets of urbanites. The hero goes there to find unlikely allies against the real evil, the great evil, the one living right out in the open, driving the fancy car and hosting cocktail parties. Monotonous and thankless as her job can be sometimes, she cheers at the thought of her coworkers—a dozen of them crammed into their little offices in the basement—all cleverly disguised as harmless geeks, all capable of saving the world if called upon.

 

Walking down the hall, Isabel sees a shadow in the kitchenette, probably Spoke, from tech support, who arrives earlier than anyone else. The thought of him gives her insides a little stir. His given name is Thomas, but everyone calls him Spoke, even their boss. Spoke is the nickname he got in the war, and though no one here was in the war with him, it comes out naturally, as if it were the only way to
acknowledge what he has been through without actually bringing it up.

 

She makes her way down the hall, composing herself, the weight of a cup in her palm.

Think pretty thoughts, she tells herself, remembering something her mother used to say to her about
thinking pretty being pretty
. Her mother was full of vaguely quotable advice for life, which she collected and offered but seemed to have no further use for herself, like a linty tissue pulled from a coat pocket. Isabel's pretty thought: autumn leaves drifting to the ground; a couple—the lovers from the postcard—under the trees.

Spoke hunches over a mason jar full of black coffee with his back to the door. A dusty blue sweater with blown-out elbows, foot tapping as he hums. It pleases her to see him like this, sitting at the kitchenette table first thing in the morning,
his black glasses fogged with coffee steam. It is as close as she has been to waking up with him.

Good morning, Isabel, he says without looking up. He's reading the newspaper.

Good morning, Spoke, she says.

She turns to the cupboard and waits to feel his eyes on her. Waits, and pretends to look through the box for a tea bag, though it is right there, the Earl Grey she has every morning.

There is a physics to their relationship. She feels the attraction as a force, like the gravitational tug of celestial bodies in orbit; but it seems that to touch, one of them must crash into the other.