The Ice Storm

by Rick Moody

  —You drank this, bub? Williams said to his son, as Elena brandished the bottle. You realize the trouble this can get you into? Do you know anything about alcohol poisoning? Do you know what to do if someone suffers from alcohol poisoning? Have you ever heard of people choking on their own insides? From this stuff right here? Can you imagine what that’s like, son?

  Elena dragged Wendy out into the corridor to give her the same dressing-down. A long, familiar disquisition. She had watched so many people in her family destroyed by this and she couldn’t watch it again. It was just too painful. Because of the way it ran in families, she or Paul could easily.… If you could have seen your grandmother.… Your uncle and his sadness and failures and all that suffering.… And don’t forget about your dad … and mental illness, and death. Young lady. Death.

  —Are you listening to me?

  —All ears, Mom.

  The next act of parental justice, the meting out of corporal punishment, arose swiftly from the lecturing, like a flash flood or act of God. Wendy had a sense that the scale of punishment that morning was a little out of whack, but she didn’t know why at first. There was some adult thing going on that she didn’t yet understand. Where was Sandy’s mom, for example? Where was her dad? Then it began to register. She permitted herself to be led down the stairs as though to an execution. She permitted herself to be swallowed. Into the continuity of police logic. Pigs.

  And there was a history to corporal punishment among the Hoods. There was a locus for punishment. It started with Paul. Paul was often a sickly child, out most of his kindergarten year at East School, with various infections and ailments—a case of strep throat and double ear infection, measles, whooping cough. Paul howled in the earliest morning hours, calling into question his own short life, in shrill, desperate shrieks that kept his parents awake, cries that in their desolation seemed to reach into his mother’s heart and wrestle with her competence as a parent. This much was family lore. Elena had developed the habit, during this period, of taking Paul’s temperature anally—because of his throat problems. It was one of those lovely, glass thermometers that was immersed in a glass case full of alcohol, the sort that seemed to foretell good by its very seriousness and simplicity. This practice persisted, until Paul came to see his mother’s approach—the mysterious darkness into which she plunged her medical instrument—as the cure itself, bringing with it a legitimation of his distress.

  This practice carried over to Wendy Hood, who also came to appreciate these ministrations given in silence, given with the dispassionate, preoccupied air of a jeweler or orthodontist. In silence, wreathed in isopropyl incense, the thermometer would tickle her hidden pink aperture, and she would be cured.

  This, however, was not the only attention visited upon her ass in the Hood household. For the ass-spanking was a regular thing there. These occasions were grandly stylized, full of careful and loving ritual. Wendy’s first spanking was the great organizing event of her early memory, though the crime that precipitated it was long forgotten. Her father carried her into her parents’ bedroom. Her mother stood by, wordlessly. She refused to take down her pants. Her father humiliated her with language until she did so—called her a slut and a hooker and a princess. It wasn’t difficult to degrade her with language—she was four. She took down her pants of her own free will. He then set her across his lap, and her mother presented the hairbrush—in the lore of the family, the bristle side was occasionally used—and, after pausing to contemplate the blank innocence of her hindquarters, her father drove the blunt side of the brush down upon her ass. What was her mother doing? Her nails?

  Wendy recognized these diverse attentions on her ass, and they had become in some way indistinguishable, one from the other. They had become the Gestalt of her body. Which came first—the good-natured nursing of her mother, or the stern, but thoughtful, beatings of her father—was now unclear. It was all wound up together. What she ate, how she dressed, whether she ventured into the crass world of facial makeup, these seemed unimportant compared to how she attended to that site of medicinal and patriarchal attentions. She was mom and dad’s little piece of ass.

  So the trip down into the Williamses’ living room had one purpose only. She could hear Sandy crying upstairs now and she could hear Mr. Williams’s escalating monologue. These words had a mumbled, cabalistic sound. Hindu sutras. T.M. Elena Hood gripped her daughter’s wrist tightly. The stark and pristine order of the Williamses’ house surrounded them. In the living room, Elena commanded her to take down her pants. Wendy would have suffered this abuse—it seemed inevitable, almost natural—even though she was fourteen years old, because she had other things on her mind, because it had been a long twenty-four hours. But then she remembered that Mike’s soiled garter belt was still tucked down there, tucked into her ski pants, and this was the one secret she wasn’t going to part with. She refused.

  —I said take down your pants, please, Elena Hood said.

  —I’m too old. What are you going to do, Mom, spank me at the prom? Come find me in college so you can spank me?

  —There’s not going to be a negotiation here.

  —Why, Mom, what are you going to do, fuck me?

  This ended the conversation. Her mother restrained Wendy in a choke hold. The room turned sideways, and suddenly Wendy was screaming, crying, and being dragged along the front hall. The details she could make out in the midst of this grim procession were strangely satisfying: the Oriental rug in the front hall bunched up under her heels; the morning sun reflected on the brass frame of a mirror in the front hall; her mother’s face, distorted in the frame. Water was dripping somewhere. Her mother’s strength was all out of proportion with her tiny, retiring body. In the bathroom—by the entrance to the basement—her mother held Wendy’s mouth shut, clamped her palm there, and ran the tap with one hand. She immersed a handy little soap ball under the tap, until it had a good head of lather, and then she forced her daughter’s mouth open—Wendy was begging for her not to do it, but these cries were wordless, strangled—and forced the wet, soapy ball into her mouth. Elena held Wendy’s mouth shut again.

  Wendy might have, ought to have, struck her mother back. She felt in her rage that she ought to have struck her mother, knocked out her straight, white, capped teeth, watched the blood flow across them (those faintly lipsticked teeth, even now faintly lipsticked), stepped over her mother’s body stretched out on the floor—but she didn’t. In an isolated chamber in her heart she complied with this torture. Maybe she had a feeling about what was coming next. She accepted it, accepted her humiliation, and the burning taste in her mouth and throat. Her limbs were weak. At last, her mother released her and she gagged and spit the little, blue soap on the crocheted rug on the floor. She wept.

  —Let’s have some breakfast, her mother said. Her voice was chilly and strange.

  Wendy collapsed into a heap on the floor.

  —Get up now, her mother said. Get up off the floor.

  But Wendy wouldn’t move.

  —Pick that up and get up off the floor.

  She lay there.

  This time when her mother moved Wendy’s body, when she lifted that frail doll’s body from the bathroom floor, Wendy knew she was barely capable. Her mother’s superhuman strength, the force field of care that surrounded her, these had all failed. Wendy would win in the end, just because she would live longer. This was how family was a bluff, a series of futile power grabs. Love was water torture, and sex was the physical abuse part of love, so sex was the torturous part of torture. Except that family was the worst torture of all.

  They repaired to the kitchen, then, as though it was the last-chance kitchen, the last place where they might share a notion about women being together. It came over them all at once, how they could make breakfast for the men, the men upstairs. It was for the men, but it was for themselves, too. Wendy and her mom might, through the alchemy of breakfast, repair the situation before going home. Wendy moved in the kitchen like a wraith. Not t
alking to her mom. Eyes red. Swollen. Since the Williamses’ stove was gas, Elena Hood was able to put on the kettle. She searched around the kitchen for a drip coffeemaker. She motioned wordlessly for Wendy to set the breakfast table. They rummaged through Janey Williams’s drawers. Then, in the next room, the den: Wendy mushed up the old issues of the Stamford Advocate and the New York Times and made a small pyramid of kindling on the grate over these rumpled sheets. The sounds of her mother’s modest domestic activities comforted her. She reached for the Ohio Blue Tip matches (strikes on any surface). She struck a match on her zipper, as Mike had once taught her to do.

  And when Mr. Williams and Sandy ventured into the kitchen, Mike was on their minds. The fire wasn’t going very well, and the two men squatted down beside her to advise on the subject. It was their job, right? To advise? Mr. Williams used the fire iron to nudge Wendy’s Duraflame log around a little bit. Sandy manned the bellows.

  —Wendy, Mr. Williams said calmly, as he poked the fire, you didn’t see Mike last night, did you?

  She told him how she had been at home watching the film about the buried woman. By the time she got over to their house, Mike was already gone. The words hurt, coming out of her mouth. All words hurt. They tasted corrosive.

  —Sandy said he was at Silver Meadow, she said, but then maybe I might have seen him there on the way by. Or maybe not. I might have seen him if he was out on the hill sledding or just running around or something.

  —But he also said he might go down to see Danny Spofford, Sandy said.

  Jim Williams placed one hand on his son’s head, and one on Wendy’s. He stood.

  —Keep your hands off each other while I make this phone call, okay? You two monsters—

  And he was smiling as he picked up the phone by the upright piano—sheet music on the stand for Moon River. But when he realized that the phone lines were down, too, his countenance changed. Out in the kitchen, suddenly, Wendy could hear him talking it over with her mother.

  —You don’t think that Janey picked him up somewhere, do you?

  —He’s probably fine, Elena said. He’s probably down at our house having sausages with Ben.

  —The phone’s dead.

  —I don’t think you should overdo this.

  The house was still for a moment. The fire consumed its fodder.

  Then Mr. Williams said:

  —Okay, you two, c’mon in here, because the time has come for a little discussion.

  Wendy and Sandy were warm in one another’s company. In front of the fire. Not talking, not feeling comfortable even, just there. Not knowing what had happened with the vodka the night before, unsure of how it got them here. Silenced by the power of the vodka to take events and reshape them somehow, to make them wild. Wendy didn’t feel like she knew Sandy exactly, but there was something she shared with him now. He offered her the bellows and she squirted a tentative stream of air on the artificial log in the fireplace. Sandy picked up the fire iron and stabbed the log savagely. A shower of blue, green, and red sparks exploded from it. Wendy choked, trying to swallow again. The lye was in her now. Traveling in her bloodstream, clogging her liver.

  The two of them padded into the kitchen, where Elena Hood arranged strips of bacon on a large skillet, broke eggs into a mixing bowl, searched for her miracle ingredient, paprika. These culinary efforts belied her shock, the blank, numb look she had, a look Wendy understood clearly, but that was lost on the Williamses. Still, Elena had reached some sort of an agreement with Jim Williams, somewhere along the line—this was obvious, in the way they gingerly circled around each other in the kitchen, in circles along the linoleum, not lovingly, exactly, but respectfully. Honoring each other just a little. Some kind of impermanent appreciation, which didn’t admit all the ups and downs but was heady for a brief moment. The result of this appreciation was going to be a joint lecture. Mr. Williams pointed to the the breakfast table. Sandy and Wendy sat.

  —Okay. Uh, everybody comfortable? Williams stood, right at the edge of the parquet in the alcove, with his arms folded. All right. Now, this isn’t an easy thing we have to talk about this morning but I think we have to talk about it anyway, and that’s why it is that your mother, Wendy, stayed here last night and not at your house.… She stayed here with me last night. That’s, uh, the first thing we have to tell you. And although the reason she stayed was primarily the electricity and the fact that we had to, uh, abandon the car in a ditch up on Ferris Hill Road, it would be dishonest if I didn’t tell you that we did spend the night together … in the … on the water bed. I have to be clear about this, kids. Now, sometimes as a marriage gets familiar it starts to age a little bit—this happens sometimes. It just happens that the people who are married—like your mother and I, Sandy, or Benjamin and Elena—get to a point where they want a little something in their marriage. They get to a point when they find themselves, uh, straying away. Look, it’s not that complicated. It’s sort of the way you might want A.1. sauce on your burger one week and mustard the next. It’s that simple. Or the way you might want to go to a McDonald’s one Saturday and to the Darien Pizza Restaurant the next time. Marriage contracts, yeah, that’s right. It gets smaller. It’s hard to get back to that place of just liking each other, or else you love one another, your love is strong, but you just don’t care for one another in the way you did. And society teaches us right now that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing to want—to want some spice. It’s an okay thing. It’s a little far out, it shakes some people up, but it’s okay. Your mother and I and probably Mrs. and Mr. Hood, too, well, we grew up at a time when, no matter what kinds of desires you were experiencing in your marriage, it was considered wrong to violate these vows that you took at the altar. What happened because of this was that our parents and their parents were angry … angry and ticked off at each other for just wanting a little variety. They were yelling at each other and sleeping in separate bedrooms and ignoring their kids—ignoring us, because we were the kids then!—while they were battling against each other—battling—for the right to have these desires. These weird little infatuations. That’s right.

  Elena’s eggs, their aroma, filled the kitchen now, and lent it concord and harmony it didn’t exactly have. Mr. Williams was getting nervous as he traveled down the rich, salesmanlike path of his reasoning. Wendy’s poisonous mouth stung. She hung her head.

  —So now we can do this if we want. We can bend these bonds a little bit; we can borrow somebody else for a night and not have it … without endangering our families or anything. Borrow out of affection, right? Not callously, but the way you would call on a friend to share something. That’s it, just sharing. And that’s what I want to say to you kids. You can wake up one morning like this, when everything outside is so pretty, and you can wake up to something confusing like finding your mother away from home and someone else—your friend’s mother, say—in her place. The car’s missing, you figure out it’s totaled someplace. But I want you to understand, bub (and Williams was sitting at the table now and leaning out over his designer place mats to look his son right in the eyes), that this doesn’t have any effect on our family. I’m here in this house. I will always be here in this house. And your mother and I may have our patches of white water, but we’re still together. We’re in this house together, electricity or no electricity. And we want to be together, to help you kids and to help each other.

  —Now, your mother, Williams went on, your mother … left the party with someone else. I want to be honest about this. I have to be straight with you. Okay? And so we can figure out what kind of situation she’s in. She has taken advantage of this opportunity that same way we have. She might be happy about it, she might not. We don’t know. But she can’t call now, because the phone lines don’t work and probably there are trees down along the roads. The electricity is out, and the roads are dangerous. And that’s why she’s not back yet. But when she gets back and when Mike gets back we will all sit down, Sandy, and probably Wendy you can count on sitti
ng down in your house, too, with your dad, and have a long conversation about what’s happened.

  Elena sat at the table next to Wendy. She passed around the plates. To Wendy, the eggs tasted bland and cold. They tasted like blue soap. Sandy was shoving eggs into his mouth without passion or joy.

  —There’s one last thing we have to go into here, Jim Williams added, and that’s the matter of you kids staying together last night. Now, I guess I don’t have to give you two a brushing-up on the birds and the bees. (Here Williams laughed a deep and hearty belly laugh that nonetheless sounded phony.) I mean, I guess I don’t have to explain to you about sexual intercourse. I will say, though, that this is a very serious business. I’m not sure in your case, bub, that you’re quite ready to handle it—I mean, when you’ve got a few dark hairs on your upper lip we can get down to some real conversation on the subject. Then I’ll teach you how to take this matter into your own hands, but until then, firstly, you guys aren’t ready and so you should confine yourselves to less, uh, invasive kinds of investigation, and secondly, if something miraculous were going to happen … say you were suddenly able to conceive—you would be in a very difficult place. Right? This is serious. Imagine, Sandy, if Wendy were to get pregnant right now, when you are thirteen and she is—what? Thirteen, too? Imagine what Wendy would have to go through over at the high school in her maternity gowns, trying to cover up the fact. And then how would you two take care of the baby once you had it? Who’s going to take care of it while you are at school? Who’s going to pay for the obstetrical care or the delivery of the child? Do you expect us to carry the expenses you two incur through stupidity? Hell, no! And who’s going to teach this kid the morals it needs to have? Its morality is already a little sloppy based on the job you’re doing now. Get it? You two aren’t even done learning morals yourselves and already you want the responsibility of taking on a kid? And add to this the fact that you don’t know how you feel about each other, because there are other … extenuating relationships going on around here. You don’t even know what you think exactly.… Well, obviously, there’s some kind of contagious quality to behavior like this. You guys didn’t get an idea this far out just by yourselves, that’s what I think. So you must have gotten it somewhere. That’s something to think about, whether you were reading one of our books and you found references to behavior like this, or what. We’d be happy to discuss this with you, rather than leave you to get all your information from books. Just bring the book down here with you, Sandy, bring the book to me, The Godfather, page whatever, that one Mike likes to read. We can go over the hard words. Look, making choices is an important thing for young people. So that’s what I’d like to offer you guys … choices. Until you have all the facts, until you know, when you’re getting into bed, how the other half lives, it’s just not a good idea. That’s what I’m saying to you, and if it’s not a good idea, you should put it off. Put it off, okay? Get it, kids?