Thin Ice (The Oshkosh Trilogy)

by Carson, Anthea

  My mom, they said, had begun yelling at me, but this had only made me laugh harder.

  They stood up to leave.

  “I have to return my car,” Krishna said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “My dad wants it back.”

  “You listen to your dad?” I said.

  “We have to leave,” they said, and moved away.

  “Wait, hang on, I’ll get my car,” I said.

  “You’re not driving in that condition,” my mom said. I grabbed the keys off the counter and headed out to the driveway after them.

  “I’ll follow you!” I shouted, and climbed into my car before Mom could stop me. I squealed my tires out the driveway.

  It wasn’t technically my car. It was technically her car, but this thought just made me laugh more.

  There were no drunk-driving laws. There was this new thing called MADD, which stood for Mothers Against Drunk Driving, but the thought of that simply cracked me up even more. I drove 90 mph to Krishna’s house, swerving by the lake and nearly tipping over. How funny was that?

  I arrived at Krishna’s and stumbled up the walk.

  “Hello Jane, welcome back. How was California?” said Krishna’s mom.

  How funny was that?

  14

  Krishna said, “We’re going to Ziggy’s going-away party.”

  “Where is he going?”

  “To Yale.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I already knew that. I must have forgotten. Where is it?”

  “New Haven, stupid.”

  “No, I mean the party.”

  “Oh. Clyde’s.”

  “Not Clyde’s!” I exclaimed. “I can’t stand him. He fawns over me.”

  “I don’t like him either. But that’s where the party is.”

  We rarely ever saw Clyde. He was some friend of Ziggy’s. I often heard the two of them arguing about the Doors.

  “I don’t like any band that uses only major chords,” I once heard Ziggy say. Clyde argued that they didn’t actually use only major chords, but that they did use them more than most bands, but that was what made them sound a little spooky. Ziggy argued that they did use only major chords. I knew that couldn’t be true, but didn’t say anything. I wasn’t about to intercede on behalf of Clyde.

  But Ziggy was probably right, because he was always right about everything.

  That’s probably why he was accepted into Yale and Clyde wasn’t. I remember hearing Clyde say, “I got the same GPA; I don’t understand it. Why did he get in and I didn’t?”

  I knew why. Ziggy’s family had been going to Yale for generations. At least, that’s what I’d heard.

  I kept becoming lost on the way to his house. Krishna gave bad directions. Then we remembered we were supposed to pick up Gay, so we had to drive out of town and back. By the time we arrived there, I was completely stoned, and it was moving towards evening, which made the place harder to find. We stumbled in the doors giggling at around 8:00, when the party was well underway. Ziggy looked up from where he was sitting, in front of the stereo, changing a record, and said, “About time you guys got here. I hope you have booze.”

  “Yes.” Krishna grinned, handing him a bottle of wine. “We brought this as your going-away gift.”

  Clyde’s house had wooden floors. That’s what I remember most about the night we said good-bye to Ziggy.

  We sat in a circle on the wooden floor in the dark, with a candle in the middle. I’m pretty sure Paul wasn’t there, but I was too drunk to notice whether he was someplace or wasn’t someplace. I didn’t think about it.

  We were playing a drinking game. It was called Wink. You had to wink at someone and then you had to take a drink or something like that.

  The candle in the center flickered, casting shadows. Everyone glanced from one to another. If you saw someone wink, you had to take a drink, or you were dead, one or the other. Or maybe both. But you had to try to wink at them before they could wink at you. Looking at them was dangerous, lest you see them wink.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “What if someone winks at you and you decide to lie about it, and deny that you saw them wink?”

  “Then unless you have a witness, you can get away with it,” Ziggy said, and then he winked at me. He couldn’t wink. He was unable to close one eyelid at a time, and he had a funny way of moving, as if the whole procedure required the entire head to participate. He couldn’t wink.

  “Did you wink at me?”

  “Yes, you’re dead. And I have witnesses.”

  “No I’m not, ’cause that wasn’t a wink. I don’t know what that was. That was a lopsided blink. Leaning your head to one side doesn’t make it a wink.”

  We started school soon after that. The night before school started, I stood at the bottom of the stairs, shouting up at my mom. I shouted, “I don’t have my school supplies!”

  “What are you talking about?” my mom asked.

  “My school supplies. I need them. I’m starting school tomorrow. It’s the first day. I don’t have any supplies.”

  “What supplies?”

  “I don’t know. Notebooks?”

  “There are notebooks around here. Go find some in the house,” she said, rubbing her eyes with sleepiness. She wore the threadbare, blue nightgown I’d been seeing my whole life.

  “But it’s more than notebooks. I’m not sure what I need, but I know I’m not prepared.”

  My dad walked behind her toward the closet. He wore his tiger-striped pajamas. I remember him helping me with my math homework, wearing those, in the kitchen. I always thought of that night when I saw those pajamas. I hadn’t been able to understand the math, and he had grown angry and yelled, and the pajamas and the math and the yelling and the kitchen table swirled into one memory.

  Dad grabbed a towel from the long, narrow cabinet and went into the bathroom behind my mother, who stood at the top of the red-carpeted stairs. She clearly wanted to end the conversation and head to bed.

  “I am not going to the store now, obviously, Jane. You’ll have to go to school tomorrow with what you have.”

  “I won’t go to school then!” I screamed in frustration.

  “I don’t care what you do!” my mom shouted back.

  A lump choked me. I flung whatever I was holding onto the carpet at the bottom of the stairs.

  The carpeting at the bottom of the stairs was red. The red carpet covered the hallway, and up the stairs, and through the tiny hallway at the top, but didn’t extend into the rooms on either side. The living room to my right was gold carpeted, and the dining room to my left was blue. I threw down the papers and the folders and the pens and pencils. They splayed over all three colored carpets.

  I don’t care what you do.

  “You don’t care?” I shouted. “You don’t care? Maybe you’ll care about this!” I ran to the kitchen.

  The lights in the kitchen were off. I went to the stove, and lit the flame. It flared high, its tip glowing blue, the rest of it sunset orange. I grabbed vegetable oil and poured it all over a crocheted hot pad my great aunt had made, then tossed it in the flame. The flame rose higher, blackening the air vent and cream-colored cabinets above the stove. Those cabinets could have used a paint job anyway.

  I headed back through the blue dining room. As I passed the red-carpeted stairs, I gave a smirk-laden warning. “By the way, the house is on fire.”

  I stomped to my nothing room and shut the door.

  The room was an add-on to the house. I had stood in the room when it had been a wooden structure with plastic wrapped around it to keep the cold out, sawdust on the floor, and one large standing light that shone too brightly.

  I went into my bathroom. That was one of the main reasons I’d moved into the add-on room: to have my own bathroom. I stood watching my insane face laughing in the gilded-framed mirror. I couldn’t stop laughing.

  The laughter had no meaning. What I had done wasn’t funny. When I really looked into those laughing eyes of mine, what I
saw wasn’t humor.

  It was fear.

  I went back into my room, under a standing light that still shone too brightly. I could see my laughing, insane reflection in the darkness of the backyard behind my picture window. I collapsed into the green folding chair, the one that Gay always passed out drunk on every time we crashed at my house instead of one of the others. I could see why she passed out in it. She probably fell over backwards like I was about to do.

  Before long, two big policemen showed up in my room. They wore blue uniforms and funny hats. I thought about Officer Friendly as I looked at them, the laughter gone.

  “Your parents said you lit the house on fire.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Why did you light the house on fire?”

  “Because it seemed like a good idea.”

  “Your parents said you were laughing and laughing about it.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “But you’re not laughing now.”

  “No.”

  “Why did you stop laughing?”

  “Because it’s not funny anymore.”

  The two of them stood there, gazing at me. I could see them watching me out of the corner of my eye, in my memory, and in the picture window.

  Then they left and closed my bedroom door.

  I overheard one of them say to my parents, who stood in robes between the red staircase and the gold living room, “She seems perfectly sane to me.”

  “What a relief,” I heard my mother say.

  My parents had put the fire out before it had done much damage. I was surprised they had reacted at all.

  15

  In those early months after Ziggy was gone to Yale, Paul simply disappeared. He went to college in town, but I didn’t see him at all. And no one saw Lucy Bacchus either, except for my mom.

  “Guess who I ran into today?”

  Krishna and I stared at each other in horror as my mom told us that Lucy had become a born-again Christian.

  Gay shook her head as if to awaken from a bad dream. “Oh my God, what a moron she is!” she said, and Krishna giggled in agreement.

  “Ugh,” Krishna said.

  “She seems happy and nice. She was polite to me, and asked me how I was doing,” said my mom.

  “Gross!” we exclaimed.

  “I was impressed,” said my mom.

  “Does that explain why she hasn’t been in school lately?” I asked.

  “She’s with a group. A Christian group of some kind. I think she’s moved in with them, some kind of camp. Anyway, she was polite. I think she’s doing very well.”

  We lay on gold couch cushions. My mom had stopped straightening and bitching at us long enough to tell us about Lucy. Now she began dusting the bar holding the thick, gold curtains. While she was dusting, the curtains were pulled back to reveal the sheer, white curtain, through which we could see the yard and the big, white house next door.

  We had our feet up on the coffee table, chain-smoking and watching Mom work.

  Finally Gay said, “Mrs. Anderson, would you like some help with that?”

  “A little late; I’m already done. And besides,” Mom said, “what I want is for you to go on home. You’ve been over here all day.”

  Gay choked on her coffee. She was probably surprised at my mother’s bluntness.

  “She’s tired,” I said, “from bitching.”

  I said this not when my mom was actually in the room, but a couple seconds after she had left.

  “I wonder why she never notices the pot smell,” said Krishna.

  “She’s probably acclimated to it,” said Gay.

  We watched the falling leaves, a sure sign that snow and cold would be coming soon. And Ziggy would be coming home. A thought we shared silently.

  My mom came back in the room with a broom. She wielded it by the handle, swinging the bristles at my friends. I couldn’t believe it.

  “What?!” I shouted. “You are out of control!”

  She was trying to sweep them out of the room. They went running in different directions, willy-nilly. Mom took a whack at Krishna’s head. Krishna’s hair went static and started flying up. Mom whacked at Gay and clipped the side of her head with the brush bristles. It probably didn’t hurt, but Gay shrieked anyway, partly from fear, partly from shock, partly from anger.

  “What the hell kind of disrespect is that?” I shouted at my mom.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Gay shouted, partially giggling. I grabbed the car keys from Mom’s purse.

  “You are not taking my car,” my mom shouted.

  “How do you want me to get them home then?”

  “Let them walk!”

  “Let’s go,” I said. I had the keys in my hand. We ran for the door. The glass doors had been put in for winter; the screen doors were gone. I was half-thinking the door would break behind us. We skidded out of the driveway and headed off into nowhere, because nobody wanted to go home.

  I was sick of Gay. I didn’t want to drop Krishna off and go home, and I didn’t want to go hang out somewhere, so I was happy joyriding. I was just sick of Gay.

  “I know what you’re doing,” Gay said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I know you’re trying to drop me off.”

  “Why, what do you mean?”

  “You keep driving by Lake Street, fucking five minutes, driving up and down fucking Bowen, Carp Ponds. You think I can’t figure that out?”

  Tingling humiliation swept up and down my legs. The back of my scalp pricked.

  “No way,” I said. How lame. But what else could I say? I felt like a little kid. I’d been caught.

  I stopped driving past her street, drove clear to the other side of town.

  We drove in relative silence for a while, Gay fuming and pouting and refusing dope, sitting with her arms folded. I supposed now she was never going to let me drop her off.

  Actually, that wasn’t true. She finally asked to be dropped off at Glinda’s, but not until she was the last one in the car. Before she slammed the back door, she said, “Hey, can you give me a ride to school tomorrow?”

  “Sure.”

  I didn’t mind driving Gay to school, really I didn’t. I didn’t usually run into Glinda if I was dropping Gay off, and not going inside, which I never did, since Ziggy wasn’t there.

  I saw Glinda in Mrs. De Muprathne’s class. Glinda was there the day Mrs. De Muprathne made her big announcement. Both of them, Glinda and Mrs. De Muprathne, had been holding back a secret for a week—or months.

  The day Mrs. De Muprathne announced it, she looked ready to pop with glee. She also had a certain way of speaking. I don’t know how to describe it—almost like she had cotton in her mouth and a strong, elitist accent at the same time. She sure didn’t sound like she was from around here. Boston?

  Anyway, when she made her big announcement I had that same feeling I had in the history class when the teacher announced they’d be watching a special video by a certain Dr. Watson. “For your information,” I had wanted to say, “Dr. Watson was over for dinner at my house practically every other weekend when I was a little kid. Why should I sit here and watch him on film?”

  That’s how I felt when I heard, “We have a special guest coming this afternoon. One of our former students attends one of the most prestigious universities in this country. He received admission to Yale University upon winning a statewide mathematics competition. None of you will ever attend a school as prestigious as that one.”

  I was surprised to hear her say this. I knew of at least four or five people from the previous year who had gone on to prestigious universities. There was Kumar Dasgupta from last year who went to Princeton, and Sophia Carlson who went to Harvard. None of them had been invited to speak about it either. I wondered vaguely why she was doing this, and telling this ridiculous lie.

  “He will be here to answer questions,” she continued, “to tell you what it is like to attend this fine university of higher learni
ng. Please give a warm welcome to. . . .”

  I started coughing so loudly I couldn’t hear his name. Then the applause started, and thank goodness, because it drowned out what became the worst coughing fit of my life. I was stuck in the back corner, practically shoved up against a window, next to Krishna and Gay, who normally didn’t attend my Shakespeare appreciation class, but who had squeezed in a few minutes before the guest of honor had appeared. I couldn’t leave and the coughing fit still wasn’t stopping, long after the applause did. I tried to hide it. I tried to cover my mouth. My face would turn beet red, I am sure, as my cheeks puffed up and I started choking once again, in the middle of Ziggy trying to tell us about his magnificent school. His arms were folded as usual, feet stuck out and crossed way out in front of him. He was graceful enough not to look over at me, but no one else was. Finally, Mrs. De Muprathne went and found me a tiny Dixie cup of water, which I promptly spewed over the people sitting in front of me.

  It was never going to stop. It never was. I coughed and coughed and coughed and coughed. I coughed through his description of the classes. I coughed through his description of the campus (which he had already told me looked like Disneyland). I coughed through the question and answer period. I didn’t hear a single thing. Every time I tried to stop, the coughing would well up inside me again and I would explode with it.

  I finally stood up, excused myself, and left the class. Still coughing, I had to step over feet and squeeze between students. I made more of a scene than I already had.

  Ziggy never looked at me. When I think back on it, it wasn’t that big a deal, someone having a coughing fit. But the minute I left that classroom, the coughing stopped. Immediately. I took another drink of water from the fountain just in case and came back into the room, made it all the way—brushing past the students—to my little corner next to the wall, the window, and Krishna. But the minute I sat down again, it started. This time I knew other people were looking at me. I tried to hide my face, but the coughing was so loud there was no point trying to hide.