The Ice Storm (6 page)

—Baby, Mike said. Our waiting is over.

From the beanbag chair, Wendy slid to the floor. She rolled across Sandy's battered pocket calculator. Her turtleneck rode up and the pale spotless area under her breasts was visible. She arranged it that way, just like Willie Mays arranged for his cap to fly off in pursuit of the long fly ball. Mike pinioned her—one arm under the beanbag, the other under a green leather footstool. A
TV Guide
with
Sanford and Son
on the cover was only inches from her face.

—Maybe we should turn on the television, Mike whispered, in case someone comes along.

—Don't be silly, Wendy said.

She dragged his hand along her stomach, and he climbed up on top of her. It was a sort of desperate embrace. Stuff was going to get into her hair, bugs and crumbs, and old pieces of gum that had been stamped into the rug.

—Tell me your long-range plans, Wendy said. Tell me that you aren't going to leave. Tell me that you aren't like all the others. Read the awful parts of the
Old Testament
to me. Would you harm people for me? Would you give me your most expensive possession? Would you be on call twenty-four hours a day? Would you leave the church of your birth for me? Would you give up weekend sports activities, including touch football? Would you do my laundry, including the very personal items? Would you take responsibility for filling my prescription of birth control pills? Would you grow your hair or go to a group encounter session or visit Nepal? Would you swing?

Their hips locked together uneasily, like mismatched pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. They ground themselves against one another slowly. She grazed the part of his jeans where the monstrous thing had swollen again. It looked as though it was bent uncomfortably toward his right pocket.

—Have you forgotten everything? Mike said.

—What do you mean, my darling? Wendy said.

—I gave you work for the weekend.

—I'm afraid I don't understand the assignment. I'm going to need an extra help session.

The quiet was funereal. Wendy slowed to a stop. Mike had transformed himself entirely into the unforgiving executive of her dreams. The guy who would look after drug and alcohol procurement. She could smell it on his breath, and his tongue had a taste it never had, a medicinal taste. Her needs were going to be met. She grabbed the back of his ass. It was loose and boyish. Just bones and jeans. Nothing more. He wrestled with her as though she were a sailor's knot he had never learned.

—C'mon, he said.

—You mean the tapes, Wendy said. You mean the tapes you wanted me to look after. You want me to fast-forward—

Mike grunted.

—C'mon—

—I'm afraid there's been a problem. There's a problem in processing—

—Wendy, Mike said, you gotta take off your pants.

—No way, not until I'm fifteen.

—It's not … you can't do it like this. You have to take off your pants.

—No way.

He caught her by the wrists again. He let go and got up on his knees. He began to fumble with his belt buckle. And then with the zipper.

—Okay, she said. Okay. I'll touch it, but that's as far as it goes.

Mike shoved his jeans down around his knees and lay down on her again. Goosebumps. His briefs were tangled in his pants. They reminded her of nothing so much as a diaper. Her turtleneck was still bunched up around her breasts, and he set his penis on the unnavigated terrain there, on her belly. It felt like a salamander to her. It felt like a salamander scampering across her.

Then the door at the top of the stairs opened.

The light when the door opened! That splendid bad news! Wendy never knew that a door, so imperceptibly ajar, could promise so much. It was like the climax of a fabulous chorale. The thrashing of Mike's salamander recaged, the unknotting and refastening of shirts and pants. Instantaneous. No soldiers anywhere were ever quicker to arms. The two of them were like some undercranked silent movie, like Keystone Cops at a laundry line.

She knew, somehow, that it was her dad who descended those stairs. Before she even heard his tiresome, methodical steps she knew it was him—the incongruity of him didn't strike her until a long time after. By the time she could see his face she and Mike had been through all the unspoken strategies and cover-ups—they could presume he didn't know what was going on, they could lie about it, they could tell the truth and hope for the best. Mike found a fourth option: he seized another
TV Guide
—Gene Rayburn on the cover—and studied it furiously.

—
When Worlds Collide
, he muttered.

—Huh?

—4:30 movie.

Her dad had reached the bottom of the stairs with the sort of exaggerated drama that marked all his paternal moments. It was fake. There was something fake about him. He stood with folded arms among the Topps packing crates.

—What the hell are you kids doing down here?

His face was scarlet. Not the color of drinking, which she knew pretty well, but the scarlet of shame and rage, the color of a baby's face when, smeared in its own poop, it is left in a parking lot with a note pinned to its breast. Wendy had seen her dad like this only a few times and she didn't like the memories.

—What do you think we're doing, Dad? she said.

—What do
I
think? I think you're probably touching each other. I think you're touching that reckless little jerkoff, for God's sake, and I think he's trying to get into your slacks. I think, at fourteen goddam years of age, that you're getting ready to give up your girlhood. And I can't believe my eyes—

—Hey, hang on there, Mister Hood—

His shirt wasn't buttoned properly. Wendy's ordinarily immaculate father, her father, the Mike's Sports mannequin, the L. L. Bean dad, had misbuttoned his shirt so that an extra inch of fabric on one side was mashed around his scarlet jowels. He was chewing the air, like he needed its nourishment in order to get fully into his elaborate condescensions. His shirt was luffing.

—Don't you direct a single word at me, Mike. I don't want to hear it. I will be speaking with your mother and father about this situation very soon. Bet your ass on that, son. I can't believe you two have any idea what you're doing here! I'm shocked to think you're so misguided, that this seems to you like the best way to spend the Thanks giving holidays. This is just shameful, you kids, shameful.

Mike wasn't going to take this last speech too well, Wendy could see this. She knew him well enough. He was considering some harsh rejoinder. It was fight or flight time. If it developed into a fight, she figured that she would root for Mike. Because her dad outweighed him by probably 140 pounds. It was only fair to back the underdog.

But Mike hung his head with barely concealed rage. He didn't say anything.

—Young lady? Her father looked her over.

—Talking to me, Dad?

—Who else would I be talking to?

—Well, then forget all this stern dad stuff.

—I'm not interested in your smart-ass remarks right now, lady. Let's go. Right now. You and I can discuss it on the walk home.

At the mention of the walk home, at the mention of pedestrian conveyance, Wendy began to crack. The regret began to creep in like the bad colors in a bad sunset. She started to feel ashamed. She had curled her hands around Mikey's almost concave stomach as she rode up on the back of his bike and it had been a cool ride. Something about the fact that her father was here without a car, that they were gonna have to walk back to their house, walk along the roads of New Canaan, in the heaviest weather, like people who couldn't manage car payments, it embarrassed her. And she would have to defend her virginity to him. It was a
burn
, as they said at Saxe Junior High School. This was a burn. It was going to be an awful weekend. It was going to be a holiday weekend. There were going to be lectures and long, cruel silences. It would never end. She curled her tresses around an index finger—as she stood silently next to Mikey—and squelched tears.

—Well, her father said.

She joined him, didn't say anything, looked back one last time at Mikey. In his haste, Mike had zipped his shirt-tail up in his fly. She thought of his beautiful red and brown pubic hair, the color and consistency of a baby's first tangles, and her worries diminished. Love was bittersweet. Then, on the way by, she thrust a hand into one of the packing boxes and came up with a half-dozen loose pieces of Bazooka.

—Services rendered, she called back to Mike.

Her father sighed.

They closed the Williamses' front door behind them. Evidence of night was everywhere. The freezing rain fell horizontally. It was ten or fifteen degrees cooler than when Wendy had waited down at Silver Meadow. Sleet and freezing rain. The mixture fell threateningly on her and her father as they made their way, skidding and cursing, down the walk and into the driveway. She began to shout a feeble and grateful apology to her father, but it was hard to manage with the wind and the rain. You couldn't hear.

On Valley Road, an emergency snow truck lumbered past them, hissing and spitting sand on the accumulating slush. Its yellow strobe lamp swiveled on top.

Wendy's father took her arm roughly at the shoulder.

—Baby doll, he called, and his voice seemed to come from some beyond.

—Baby doll, don't worry about it. I really don't care. I'm just not sure he's good enough, that's all. We can keep this between us.

She didn't get where he was coming from. She could hear the apology.

—Huh?

—I mean, he's a joker. He's not serious. He'll end up living off Janey and Jim, you watch. He's just not worth it. And that's not a family you want to be part of.

—Dad.

They walked in cinnamon slush. They sank deeply into it. The precipitation fell with a relentless uniformity. On nearby communities with less affluent tax bases—Stamford and Norwalk—as well as on New Canaan's wealthy. The sleet ruined Wendy's toe socks and her father's cordovan loafers and at the same time, across town, it ruined the orthopedic shoes of Dan Holmes's sister, Sarah Joe, one of the special-education kids at Saxe Junior High. Sarah Joe's heart was all battered and worn, and she seemed to know it. But she managed to trudge along. The kids said that she would sleep with anyone. Wendy wondered if Sarah Joe had any instincts about positions and sex, if she knew about the myth of the vaginal orgasm, or if she felt somehow intuitively that her sexual fumblings were more gratifying with someone she loved. Sarah Joe, laboring up Brushy Ridge Road herself, through the slush, walking up that hill that all the boys careened down in tenth gear.

Somewhere the popular girls were trapped indoors with their ephemeral crushes, the infatuations they shared with no one. And elsewhere the half-dozen poor boys of New Canaan High, whose fathers would have to go out into the snow and run the plows, watched TV from couches covered in flame-retardant vinyl. The sleet and snow turned the last light a sullen yellow. The sky looked awful, nauseating.

Wendy wanted to know why conversations failed and how to teach compassion and why people fell out of love and she wanted to know it all by the time she got back to the house. She wanted her father to crusade for less peer pressure in the high school and to oppose the bombing of faraway neutral countries and to support limits on presidential power and to devise a plan whereby each kid under eighteen in New Canaan had to spend one afternoon a week with Dan Holmes's sister, Sarah Joe, or with that other kid, Will Fuller, whom everybody called
faggot
. Wendy wanted her father to make restitution for his own confusion and estrangement and drunkenness.

So when he asked how cold her feet were and then hoisted her into his arms for the last quarter mile, past Silver Meadow, down the embankment, through the thicket of barren trees, across the circle in the driveway, the driveway covered with frosted maple leaves, maple leaves, maple leaves, where a single lonely soccer ball lay buried in a crater of slush, the soccer ball Paul had been kicking around despondently before going into the city—when her father carried her close to his chest in silence, she thought it was fine. She would put off her journey to the Himalayan kingdom of the Inhumans. She would stay with her family for now.

More of same—or worse. That was the weather report. The mercury would retreat into its little bulb. The heavens would open. Elena foresaw glazed and treacherous roads. Ski jackets with fur fringe. Hats with pom-poms. And this wasn't all bad. Any excuse to avoid the Halfords' party was a blessing.

She was in the library. Cross-legged on the sofa. Her home was silent as a library. Reading was a brave spiritual journey for Elena Hood, and little piles of books were for her like the stacks of rubble—the Tibetan prayer walls—that marked the progress of pilgrims. There was a warm force field, an invincibility, around her in the midst of this reading journey, no matter how conventional it was by 1973, no matter how trammeled, shopworn. She cherished the
I Ching
and the tarot deck, though she told no one in the suburbs; she believed her decisions were mapped by unseen cartographers. She purchased books from the occult and religious studies sections according to their spines, or if she overheard talk about a title, or if it was advertised in
Psychology Today
.

In her library, in firelight, she read, in silence. Her hair was frosted blond. Her glasses were thick, but she wore them only for reading. The rest of the time she squinted. She wore amber wool slacks and a wool sweater she had knitted for herself and Hush Puppies. Elena was always cold. Her college textbooks were relegated to a low, dusty corner of the shelves, below the Book-of-the-Month Club selections—glossy, hardcover editions of current fiction that she ordered for her husband, who neglected them.

She was reading about impotence in older men. She had opened Masters and Johnson,
Human Sexual Response
, to the very page. According to the experts, the chief cause for the diminishment of intercourse in middle-aged couples was a single incident of impotence. This initial crisis, whether caused by the traditional drinking—
provokes desire but affects performance
—or by anxiety or other mental factors, so frightened men that thereafter they frequently inclined toward celibacy. In their indignity and remorse, they claimed to be uninterested.