Just as she started after Thomas, the doctor appeared in the doorway. Thomas’s cheeks—it was eczema, actually, and not spirit—went instantly tomato.
“Not so fast, my man,” said the doctor, scooping up the toddler.
Thomas stood straight up on the doctor’s lap, his bowlegs locked, alarmed, but possibly interested.
Caryn produced an exaggerated sigh for the doctor. She rose and held out her arms to receive her baby. She shook her head as if to say resignedly, fourth child. It occurred to her that there was a lot of bluffing that went into a relationship with a doctor. Come on, she said silently. Hand him over.
But the new pediatrician seemed to have his own agenda. “Please sit down, Thomas’s-Mom,” he said gravely.
Caryn cringed. The doctor looked at her over the top of his glasses. “The terrible twos at fifteen months.”
Taking her seat, Caryn told herself it was standard issue, the way he crunchled his short beard with one hand and appeared to hold the child effortlessly with the other. But still, she sensed the floor of her stomach.
And then the doctor made his now-famous comment. “The ears don’t have to be a badge of courage.”
At first she had no idea what he was talking about. She was already on shaky ground: a new pediatrician, and Thomas performing agitated knee-bends on the fellow’s quadriceps. For a second she wondered if she had misunderstood words of wisdom; then she saw the pediatrician’s long fingers pulling Thomas’s ears out.
It’s true that she has replayed the scene so many times it’s become rote. Stilted. The way the light through Thomas’s distended ears shown crimson, like his cheeks, the way the doctor’s white coat was almost blinding, a well-planted movie shot, really, and she had momentarily thought that maybe it wouldn’t be fire or flood, after all, that destroyed her family, but something she learned from a doctor. And she knew, at least for an instant, that fear of death generated all other fear in the world.
The pediatrician—she’d said to Dom: the fucking doc—had wanted to pin Thomas’s ears back. Stitch them, albeit temporarily, to the sides of her son’s head, so that he would look like Go, Dog, Go!, a Dr. Seuss hound in the perpetual headwind of a drag race.
“Like a Doberman Pinscher?” she’d demanded.
“Train them,” the doctor had sort of correctively mumbled.
But even as she was stabbing her things back in the big boxy diaper bag, Caryn was considering. What would it be like if her children—not just Thomas, but in the abstract, children—were perfect? Would it make for a storybook that was somehow easier to remember?
Of course, her brain ticked, it would be a simple outpatient procedure. Maybe it could be done right here in this office. Would insurance cover it even though it was cosmetic? Would Thomas claw at the stitches in his sleep or when he was bored in his stroller or his car seat?
Then Caryn caught the doctor keeping keen watch on her. And she had harnessed her fear of death, a moment before so lucid, and as if to mock it, she’d choked out: “You should have been a veterinarian.”
At four o’clock the snow stops and Caryn finds herself strangely unsettled. She can almost hear the low roar of the highway, a science-fiction river in a one-dimensional, fictive distance.
Louisa and Anne are playing cards in embarrassing British accents and Thomas has exiled himself to the basement in order to yell, because yelling is particularly not allowed when you’re snowed in, says Caryn. She catches herself getting chippy. The house is a hive, self-contained. She has cans and cans of tuna. She has raisins and M&Ms, apple-cranberry juice. She leaves Paul in the kitchen and mounts the stairs to check on Tori.
Her oldest child is two weeping, watermelon eyes at the top of a snow-colored comforter. “How did you collect five water glasses?” says Caryn before she can stop herself. She goes to the window. The sky has thickened once more and snowflakes like the soft undercoat of a shedding mammal begin to spin and arc around the big linden. “Believe it or not,” she says, “a couple of ice skaters are coming up the hill at this very moment.” Tori’s comforter rustles.
The snow against the glass is like a wave breaking. The cars are prehistoric mounds, the wind is now a giant. Caryn opens the window a crack and then pinches the storm window to slide it open. The woman ice skater is carrying brown leather skates in her gloved hand. The man must have his skates over his shoulder, under his coat. They would’ve needed a bulldozer to get to the ice, thinks Caryn.
“You can’t go skating in this.” Tori’s voice comes out creaky. Even when she’s sick she doesn’t trust her mother.
Caryn sticks her nose out, miming deep breaths. The sound of a snow shovel—no longer a scrape, the snow is too deep to get down to the sidewalk—comes from inside the earth. Finally, right behind it, is the deep rumble of the snowplow. “I’m sick,” her big daughter says, drawing her head off the moist pillow, long-suffering, indignant.
The snowplow is a woolly mammoth. Caryn closes the window. She puts her hand briefly on Tori’s forehead and Tori accepts it faithlessly. Caryn takes all five water glasses between her fingers.
In the kitchen, Paul is steadily pouring his milk onto his placemat.
It’s not like him, usually she wants to shake him for being overly polite, and Caryn is more concerned than irritated. She puts a dishtowel on the white lake but doesn’t say anything.
“That airplane sounds like blades in the sky,” remarks her nephew. His calm is false. Caryn knows he’s been using all the powers of his imagination to make it stop snowing. The snow is coming down in chunks and curtains.
She knows it’s the wrong thing to say but she says it anyway: “There’s no way a plane would fly in this.”
Paul speaks French with his dad like an angel. Too sweet, almost. Louisa, who mines her jealousy with lewd pleasure, sings from the radio, “Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir,” and Paul blushes. Caryn guesses Louisa feels encompassed by her sisters, even suffocated. She has no cold edge against the world like Tori, the oldest, and Anne, next to a brother. She never gets new clothes (she complains bitterly, predictably), and she doesn’t even get to keep the hand-me-downs. Louisa could be the unhappiest of her children, just because of birth order. Caryn chides herself. She’s not a fortune teller. She’s a parent.
Anne is the most like Caryn. Fair-skinned, open-minded, usually quiet. Always dependable, the one who puts the new toilet paper on the roll, reminds them to stop humming Christmas songs in February. Caryn suspects Anne is Dom’s favorite. A father can have a favorite.
For a moment she wonders what it would be like if Dom were here in the snowstorm with them. The point is they’re out of the storm, she corrects herself. But it feels like they’re within it.
She used to call Dom Big Man on Campus. It amazes her suddenly, seems passive-aggressive, almost, in today’s careful rhetoric. Also because he’s short, although back then she didn’t think so. Dom the sprinter, fireball, speed demon: top-rated college athlete.
A gentleman jock. If someone twisted his ankle in a meet, Dominic would give up his time, his rank, his flow, and stop mid-race to help the injured runner. When Dominic slowed, his body gave the impression of unwinding. Caryn loved to watch the high light blur of his run break apart, become mechanics. The decelerating, effortless jog, the torso slanting back against the very wind he’d just created.
He watched over his moods as carefully as his muscles. He said it depressed him not to help his fellow human. He was also prelaw; Caryn was lost somewhere in the Art Department. In fact, you could fall in love and call it art. She would have liked to major in watching Dominic Arletta’s races.
One blowy winter day in her senior year Caryn entered the art studio and beheld the track star, stripped down to shorts, emerging from the janitor’s closet. He appeared neither proud nor flustered. He ran his hand through his hair, which was warm brown, wavy, and long for a jock, and took his place on the pedestal.
“We have a new model,” the professor remarked, and
then off-handedly gave the assignment.
“What about the shorts?” said a big, coarse, boarding-school girl next to Caryn.
Caryn found herself infuriated. She glared at the girl and the girl snickered. Of course he wasn’t naked. That was for middle-aged women, who, for the very reason they were ashamed of their stippled stretch marks and hormonal flushes, displayed themselves in front of college students. Perverted. Not Dominic. And she didn’t need to see any more to know she loved him.
He said he was five ten so more likely he was five eight. He was slight but strong, skin a luminous olive. There was nothing extra about him, as if his heart, too, were pure in its race. His light eyes were full of amusement at his predicament.
He wasn’t hard to approach. He was used to sporty female friends, they all massaged each other’s charley horses. He was a boy, funny and careless, and a man, careful and serious. Caryn learned that he was modeling for credit: a semester in her drawing class so that he could get away with more track meets, fewer liberal arts courses. Caryn learned that he had a girlfriend—a runner, they did ten easy loping miles together on Saturdays—who was beautiful, black, and taller than Dominic by practically four inches.
In the spring Caryn showed her senior project. It only took her one night to assemble a clutch of driftwood like furniture. It was totally unusable. Her advisor said she should try to follow through on a concept. Was she trying to posit, her advisor queried, that conversation was a conceit? Ironic? So Caryn called it Conversational Grouping. Art was all in the title.
Ellen was coming up right behind her, in textiles. She gave Caryn an old-time train conductor’s cap she prescribed as Caryn’s handle. She would fix some couture-ish concoction on Caryn and then have to scissor Caryn out of it. She’d wail, “Why am I designing fabric for airplane seats?” Ellen wore her own clothes like she thought she was starting a movement.
During graduation week, between magnolia and lilac, the university was all send-off receptions. The Greek Revival and Georgian brick university houses, with their high-walled gardens and miniature avenues of boxwood, were opened to students. Caryn and Ellen bought a structurally sound if prom-queen-like wedding dress at a secondhand shop. Together they sewed on seven layers of skirts in varying shapes and textures. The bodice was tight, opaline, and the petticoats were shell, snow, yellow, bone, smoke, dust, parchment.
The evening of the art department party was balmy and bowered with ornamental cherries in huge pale tufts and grass freshly clipped and fragrant. Caryn, in a rainbow of whites, went barefoot. The white wine seemed to be just another petticoat, and she got very drunk with very little effort. An hour into the party she was more or less incapacitated. Ellen had vanished, and who should appear but Dominic Arletta.
She has to ask herself now, in light of Tori in high school, was this an era before date rape? Was there really any chance goodness preceded badness in history? But the truth is, Caryn had been rescued. Dominic took her to his room, which smelled of clean laundry and plain seltzer, and, while she lay where she had fallen diagonally across his bed, he talked about running professionally versus law school, and how he did remember her from what he called his “ersatz modeling.” He turned out to be as kind—straightforward, unassuming, he wouldn’t have read anything into her ridiculous costume—as she’d suspected.
It occurs to Caryn now that she’d like to say it with grace. With gratitude, even. Not to invoke the near scandal, the heartbreak she caused her parents. Because that first night with Dom—that was Tori. Ellen Victoria. How ornate, amateurish, the name seems now.
She and Dom were married in August. She didn’t wear the dress of many whites; her mother chose a disgraced-fat-lady tunic. Raising her eyes again to the blanked-out kitchen window, thinking about her parents, Caryn realizes she’d choose to be snowed in without them. She doesn’t want them on her ark, her houseboat. Why isn’t it enough to do what you think is right, Mother? How does imposing your right on me make you all the righter? Her mother, as if apologizing for her: “That’s just college gibberish, Caryn.”
Ellen had shown her support by shielding her eyes from the tunic of shame, and their love—Caryn and Dominic’s—was transformed into an ongoing state of relief, thinks Caryn.
The phone rings. “It’s six o’clock,” snaps Caryn, catching herself when she sees Paul’s forlorn aspect. “He’s sitting right here at the kitchen table.”
Ellen drives a tiny, lime-green Beetle that would be better suited to France, or a golf course. There is no way she is driving in this. It’s not an apology, notes Caryn.
The only reason Ellen does not live in France is to be close to Caryn. Otherwise she hates this mini Mafiosi municipality, as she calls it, and Da-veed hates it, and they are always cracking on the mayor, who looks like Mr. Toad from The Wind in the Willows and possibly inflicted cigarette burns on his wife’s lover. Secretly Caryn takes offense when any Italian name is parodied.
Ellen says defensively, “I’m not going to walk over.”
No. From one side of the city to the other. But here is Paul, grieving at the kitchen table.
They’re snowed in. The universe is snowed out. If there is no more universe, it doesn’t matter that they are the five children and she is the mother. They are all on equal footing. It’s a regular commune. A utopia, as the founding fathers would have had it. As she strides from the kitchen into the body of the house, she cries, “Anyone for minestrone?”
“What is a state of emergency?” Paul bleats from behind her. He won’t eat canned soup. Da-veed makes his own stock with bones and parings. She should set Paul up with paints or Play-Doh. Thomas has refused all contact. She pulls a book of busywork mazes from under a pile of library books.
“Here, Paul,” she says, handing him a pencil.
“Thomas!” she calls down into the basement. “I’ll take you outside, Thomas!” She places her palm against the wall to descend the narrow staircase. There are the snow shovels against the stone wall, looking sheepish.
The basement is one big room with wobbly homemade shelves in deep corners. At first she doesn’t see Thomas in the gloaming. He can’t reach the chain on the bare bulb, and she suspects part of the allure of the basement is the semi-darkness. There are the hammers and nails, the cordless drill, the sodden bags of MiracleGro like blue salt, the pickax and handsaw have a life of their own. There’s an instinctual fear, a surprise element about childhood.
He tackles her from behind. She screams before she can help it. His monkey limbs around her middle. “Thomas!” She pries him off roughly but he’s incited, ready to go body to body. She can hear her daughters’ running steps through the house. They heard her scream. She hopes she hasn’t scared Paul. She doesn’t think he’d budge from the kitchen table without her.
“Hello-oh,” says Louisa in a deadpan down the stairs.
“Mom?” Anne, younger by twenty months, calls pragmatically.
Caryn calls up, “Sorry!” She shakes Thomas off.
Halfway up the stairs she smells fire.
The soup? She wastes time trying to relive the moment she turned the gas off. But it’s not a food smell. There’s Louisa guarding the doorway. “Hurry?”
It takes Caryn a moment to understand it’s not her they’re worried about. Paul seems to have ignited several pages of the maze book. He’s solving mazes with trails of fire.
Thomas is on her heels, pushing around her, beneath her, panting with excitement. “Where did you get matches?” There is real awe in his voice. Caryn doesn’t allow matches. Not in any drawer or cabinet. Not locked away, call her paranoid—they don’t have candles. They have a single, disabled hearth known as the Santa Claus fireplace. She knows Dom thinks it’s neurotic, but he’s good at picking his battles.
Louisa and Anne are gathered close. All of a sudden, the whole tabletop is alight. There must have been grease, a feast fire. Paul stumbles out of his chair, backward, giving over his rights as a guest, his spectacle. For a critical moment, C
aryn is motionless. What would it look like if the fire wound down the legs of the table? What would her floor look like? Would it be tempting, somehow, to walk across it?
Caryn’s mind goes blank. This is fear, manifest.
Or relief. Thomas in a fireman’s hat. He’s wielding a dusty red canister with a mallard beak. In countless dreams Thomas has practiced.
When the fire is out, Caryn has a tremendous need to escape. She’s been inside for three days now. She finds Thomas’s coat and snow pants and her own long wool coat that she never wears because it’s supposed to be a dress coat. She bunches an orange scarf around her neck that Anne knit for a favorite teacher. Caryn and Thomas push the front door together. It seems to push back against them. They’re stymied for a moment. Anne says, “The window—” and Thomas, newly capable, authorized, set in motion, is already hoisting it, jumping out over the sill as if over the rails.
Caryn follows.
Jumping into the storm is like jumping into water. She goes deep—deeper than she’s ever swam in any lake or ocean. She hears the distant thrum of the highway and her own pulse in her ears like water pressure. The snow is coming down sideways, a scrim, and she almost can’t tell the shore, the sidewalk. She looks up at the house and finds her bearings.
MADRONA
The air was watery, snow by afternoon. Taylor clubbed her hands inside her coat pockets. Her building, with a gray awning that seemed to corral the cold, marked the spot where the tree-lined street lost its trees and sidewalk and became a route-numbered highway that coursed through acres of big-box stores and family restaurants. Taylor set off on foot: the little townish town was in the opposite direction.
She’d had no idea she had poor circulation until she watched her freshman-year roommate running around all winter in dishabille, in camisoles. Emily Linder looked like she was peddling bra straps.
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