Sonya returned from dinner at her sister’s house in Queens with a tin of homemade sugar cookies. “You’re a saint!” Oscar said as he watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas and dunked the cookies into a glass of tea.
Ben went to a buffet supper at Amanda’s parents’ apartment. There were three trees: one with white lights in the living room, one with colored lights in the den, one covered with origami animals in the foyer. All had been done by a florist.
“I believe I know your father,” Amanda’s mother said a little stiffly, which made Ben wonder.
Sarah made bûche de noël for Kevin’s family while Kevin, his brother, and his father watched sports on the TV in the paneled basement. After dinner they ate the entire bûche de noël, then went back downstairs, leaving the women to do the dishes. “You look like you’ve lost some weight, honey,” Kevin’s stepmother told Sarah.
Tad did a party in the children’s wing of the cancer center in Nasserville. One little girl drew a picture of him with crayons and he put it on the refrigerator when he got home. “They should pay you!” his aunt said indignantly, taking his plate of baked ham and macaroni and cheese from the oven.
Jim Bates gave his sister, Polly, a white angora sweater. “It’s a cloud,” she said, holding it up. Then she put it on over her nightgown. “I’m tired,” she said. “Yeah, I know, Pol,” her brother said, putting the teakettle on.
Rebecca almost missed the day entirely. She lost track of time constantly these days, knew it was the weekend only because Jim Bates would fetch her in his truck, knew night was beginning to fall when the edges of the trees and the hem of the horizon blurred. She discovered it was Christmas because she went to Tea for Two first thing and found it closed. Closed, dark, silent, along with the hair salon, the insurance-travel-accounting agency, and all the other businesses downtown. The streets were deserted except for a young woman with a baby peeking quizzically from a front pack.
“The Gas-and-Go is open,” the young woman said, holding up a cardboard cup of coffee. When she paused, the baby began to wail, so she started walking again, fast, slewing from side to side as though she was ice-skating on the sidewalk. All was calm as the young mother skated off toward the Methodist church.
The church bells began to play “O Holy Night.” In her jeans pocket Rebecca’s phone vibrated. There was a text from Ben: “Happy whatever we call it.”
At the Jewish Home for the Aged and Infirm, Bebe Winter sat in the visitors’ room and played all day. For whatever reason, she played the piano part of Handel’s Messiah.
THIS IS HOW THESE THINGS HAPPEN, PART ONE
Rebecca had printed out the cross pictures, which looked better and better to her each time she worked with them, and she had split a tuna melt with the dog, whom she was embarrassed to admit she called Dog when she called him at all. Giving him a name implied permanence and ownership, and she wasn’t prepared to embrace either. Her building in New York forbids dogs over forty pounds, and while this dog looked half-starved when he arrived and is now still lanky, she can tell just by looking him over that he is heavier than that. He has eyes like black glass beads, and one ear that stands up like a cowlick after the other has fallen. He follows her everywhere, into the forest, around the house, but he doesn’t like the idea of getting in the car. Twice that morning he had laid his head in her lap and looked up at her, and it was then that she thought about naming him, and realized that doing so made him one more brick in a wall that stood between her and her former existence.
“Don’t become too attached,” she said aloud, to one or the other of them.
It was too late; the dog had become attached. Perhaps it was the low even voice, the absence of screaming and hitting, the warm bedroom and the full food dish. Sometimes his ears would stiffen and Rebecca would imagine he was hearing something far away. This was correct; from the trailer at the bottom of the hill he could hear a quavering voice, its tremolo equal parts paranoia, distress, and medication, calling, “Jack! Jack, come back! Come home!” When Rebecca heard any of this at all she assumed it was the wind, which had picked up sharply since morning. The dog walked to the living room, turned in a circle, sank to the floor. A cold finger ran up his feathered spine, a sudden gust under the warped front door.
It had started snowing at midday, downy snow that picked up volume until the tree line was obscured by pale gray-white. Rebecca went out into it for about an hour, circling the woods and then walking down the drive to look in the mailbox. She had been looking for her latest check from the state, which was late or lost or merely tormenting her by keeping her waiting. The dog lifted his head to sniff the open mailbox. “Nothing,” Rebecca said aloud.
When they turned back, flakes heavy on her lashes and the dog’s muzzle, she saw that their tracks were being filled in swiftly. She had little experience of snow like this, that seized and overwhelmed its surroundings, wiping out all the sharp edges and landmarks. Snow in the city was a passing thing even when it was substantial, Central Park’s peaks and gullies muted by a silvery glow at 5:00 A.M. and then slowly reappearing as the runners thumped the snow off the roads, the dog walkers tamped it down on the paths. In the city snow was as transient as a tourist. Here it stuck. Twice she heard a skittering noise that took her back to that night with the raccoon in the trap, then realized it was snow barreling down the slope of the roof.
It was a good day to stay inside, get some work done, throw the frozen turkey carcass from Thanksgiving in a big dented pot, the only really sizable pot in the house. The architect and the book editor had bought it one summer and brought it up from the city for a lobster feast that had gone awry because of too much Chardonnay, sun, and a certain sexual overlap between and among their friends of which they’d been unaware. Rebecca let the pot simmer bones into stock all day long, perfuming the house with something comforting and substantial. She defrosted some of the ground venison, too. Jim Bates had brought her a dozen packages of frozen meat and a bag of bones for the dog. “He seems like a good dog,” he had said, looking him over while the dog sat at attention next to his truck, wagging his tail hard.
“He seems to like you,” Rebecca had said, which was true.
She had been a little dispirited by the size of the venison portions; they were so conspicuously designed for a person alone, two small chops in some, a half pound of ground meat in others. And then she realized that that was how it had been packaged for Jim, that he would sit in the evening in that yellow kitchen and she at the dining room table here, each eating the solitary meal of a single person. She wondered if she should invite him to dinner, then dismissed it as too much. Lunch someday, perhaps.
She went to sleep early, slept long and heavily. When she finally woke, the dog was whimpering in the bedroom doorway, and the room had turned dull pewter. It was just after eight in the morning by her watch, and she jumped out of bed, the wood floor frosty on her feet. The dog was used to going out by six.
She pushed at the front door, but nothing happened. Again and again she tried, while the dog whimpered and then finally barked sharply. He’d peed on the floor in other houses, not wanting to but having no choice, and what happened after was painful and memorable. This woman seemed disinclined to hit him, but you never knew.
When Rebecca gave up and looked out the window, she saw a moonscape around her, the path, the steps, even the car wiped out by enormous drifts of snow. Several breached the bottoms of the windows, and a light powdering inside showed where the sills fit ill.
In the back bedroom she found a window that opened. When she shoved it up the snow blew in, and the dog heaved up and hopped out. He was instantly buried to his shoulders, and Rebecca stood and watched as he weaved around the deeper drifts over to the tree line and into the forest, where the canopy was weighed down low and white and the ground was a bit clearer. He tried to lift a leg, put it down, satisfied himself with squatting, went a little farther until he was just a sandy back and neck, then returned. It was still snowing hard, and
what was already on the ground was blowing fitfully in a steady series of strong gusts.
For the first few hours it felt like an adventure, the two of them alone in the deep deep silence, not of the house but of its surroundings, muffled completely by the snow batting in which they found themselves wrapped. Rebecca was pretty certain of the location of her car, but if it was where she thought it was it had been completely buried by a drift that butted up against the shed. Twice more she opened the back window for the dog, but by the second time the snow was even higher and tipped off the sill and into the room, melting on the splintery floor. Sleep that night was not so deep, and toward dawn, or what she thought was dawn—like the aurora borealis, the glowing snow had turned the edges of night into a strange imitation of day—she felt the dog tentatively climb onto the end of the bed, and she didn’t push him off. The house smelled like turkey stock and woodsmoke, and she ran over in her mind how much food in cans she had in the cabinets, and as she did that she realized that she was completely alone, cut off from everything around her, and that that was a feeling she had had living within her for a long long time without allowing herself to recognize it.
In the morning she pushed the snow off the outside sill of the window with a dustpan, and hoisted the dog over the edge. He fell into a drift, and pushed his muzzle deep into it. He could manage only a few steps, doing his business with his head down as though he was ashamed to have so little privacy. She couldn’t know that it reminded him of all the times he’d looked for a fresh spot to squat when his range was circumscribed by a length of chain and a choke collar. He managed to put his paws on the outside sill, and she hoisted him in by his front legs and gave him half of an English muffin. Since she so often ate at Tea for Two, the poor store-bought muffin was a little hard at one edge.
She put the light on under the stock again just for the heat and the smell, put another log on the fire, and realized as she did that the six others stacked nearby were all she had. There was a whole wall of wood against one side of the house, split and stacked, but all of it was under snow like her car and the snow shovel leaning useless against one wall of the shed. She was overwhelmed by her own stupidity and helplessness. She had a phone and a computer, neither of which worked in this house. Somewhere a few miles down the mountain there were scones, and espresso, and cell service, but they might as well be in Tibet. Or, she supposed, on West Seventy-Sixth Street, which seemed just as far away.
“It has to melt at some point,” she said to the dog, who lifted that one rebellious ear, then laid himself down flat as a throw rug.
She worked for a few distracted hours, reprinting more of the cross pictures, looking at the images taken from different angles. For an hour after lunch she took pictures of the dog, the hard scarred pads of his paws, the rough fur of his back, finally his face, full-on. He seemed to understand his function; he cocked his head, turned it slightly, raised a brow like a cartoon character. With no one to hear her but him, Rebecca said, “This is what it’s come to. Birds and dogs. Next I will be shooting weddings. I will be working for a studio that takes the high school graduation photos.” The dog listened carefully. He liked it better when she was not unhappy.
Just before four o’clock, with two fast flickers and the asthmatic wheeze of the old refrigerator, the power went off, and in the half-light she closed her eyes and sighed. “Candles,” she said. But there were none. Of course.
THIS IS HOW THESE THINGS HAPPEN, PART TWO
For the rest of her life Rebecca Winter would apprehend the rumble of a truck engine in deep silence, or anything dimly like it, even the rhythmic solo roll of a kettledrum in a symphonic passage, as the soothing sound of salvation.
It was past nightfall by the time she heard it, but how far she could not have said. For hours she sat in the dark, with nothing to do except think of things, so that her thoughts covered a world tour of subjects: whether the cross photographs were enigmatic or merely confusing, whether her work would still sell again at slightly or greatly reduced prices, whether she could sell the New York apartment for enough money to live on for the foreseeable future, whether Ben would be bereft if she sold it, whether she could bear to live outside Manhattan, whether she should live closer to her father, what the Mary Cassatt was worth, what her own life was worth now that it felt oddly like someone else’s life. She thought for the first time in years of being pregnant, and how her body had once felt as though it no longer belonged to her and yet was more hers than it had ever been before (or after). “I’m gobsmacked by those men who say they are aroused by a pregnant woman,” Peter had said, in that way in which he insisted he was merely being factual when he was really being cruel.
She was thinking of Peter, wondering whether the sex and his accent were enough to explain why she had married him (they were, if you threw in the way he read poetry, which was related to both), when she heard the truck climbing the driveway. The spotlights of headlights ran across the front windows, asking a semaphore question, and the dog barked an answer. Rebecca ran to throw open the door before remembering that this was impossible. On tiptoes she could see the very top of the blade of a plow illuminated, yellow as a taxicab, by the lights of the truck. For an hour it moved back and forth, back and forth, like a student driver learning to perform a K-turn, until there were mountains of snow interrupted by flat areas of drive and battered grass. Then there was the scraping of a shovel against the door, and with her on one side and Jim Bates on the other, pushing, pulling, pushing, pulling, the door finally came open, and the harsh winter wind blew in and scattered dead ashes across the stone hearth.
“Damn,” he said, ice on his eyebrows and lashes. “I thought you were asleep. The place is pitch black.” He stomped snow off his boots on the threshold. “Ah, hell,” he said. “No power?”
“None whatsoever,” Rebecca said, twisting her odd mouth in a way that made his heart stutter-stop. What she thought looked wry he read as scared and sad. He was right.
“Wait,” he said and waded back into the cold, and the black, and the silver-white night, turned off the truck, and pulled something from behind the driver’s seat.
“One Coleman lantern,” he said as he put it on the dining table, where it cast a small but somehow unearthly glow, like the last fire in the last place on earth.
The dining room table in the home of a person living alone becomes the entire world, divided into countries: the area for the mail, for work if there is any, a small duchy set aside for the placement of one dish, one bowl, one fork. Rebecca looked at her table in the wan yellow light of the lantern and saw her life in all of its loneliness, and when he looked up she could see it reflected in his face. It was the first time he had been inside her house since he had rousted the raccoon, and it felt entirely different than it had that day, when she was a customer and he a hired man.
“Thank you,” she muttered, as though she was dismissing him.
“You haven’t yet begun to thank me,” he said and pulled a bottle from inside his parka. “Tullamore Dew,” it said.
“Behold,” he said, as his eyebrows thawed and made rivulets down his pink face.
She couldn’t remember the last time she had had whiskey, or even alcohol. In the beginning she had had wine with her dinner, but the solitary glass, the recorked bottle—both had underlined what she thought of as her exile. The Tullamore Dew had a pretty name, was a pretty color, was smooth and easy, particularly after the first jelly glass full. She put her head back against the tired lumpy couch and listened to him talk, about how there was so much snow that Sarah had had to keep Tea for Two closed, about the ninety-seven-year-old woman on Creek Road he’d plowed out, who’d given him half a pie and two dollars—“one in quarters, if you can believe it”—about how the snow had brought down the roof of the volunteer fire station and he’d be working on that as soon as the weather cleared, although he didn’t like to do flat roofs.
He didn’t tell her how Tad had called him and said, “Do you think Ms. Win
ter is safe up there on her own?” and he’d said, “Ah, hell,” because he’d gotten so busy plowing out his sister’s place and the woman on Creek Road and the Methodist church where they had the AA meetings that he’d left it too long, maybe because he thought Rebecca was as self-sufficient a person as he’d ever known, despite not knowing when there was a raccoon in the attic and buying firewood from that idiot Kevin.
“You still awake?” he said finally, when he got exhausted filling the silence, a little worried that he’d been rambling in that way people who know they’ve had a lot to drink do. He hadn’t had a lot to eat, he realized, as he smelled turkey, and the whiskey was running a little wild inside him because of that. It was getting cold, too. No power, no furnace. He poked the logs in the fireplace.
“Not entirely,” said Rebecca finally, her eyes faint glimmers at the bottom edges of her lids, and something about that, the spark in the dark, made him lean down and kiss her, a Tullamore Dew kiss that, in the way of semidrunken kisses, got very wet very fast. He was really enjoying himself until suddenly, as though all the languor and relief of being rescued had disappeared in an instant, Rebecca pulled back—no, when she thought of it afterward, ever afterward, she realized she had recoiled, and she was mortified and remorseful.
But that was later.
He pressed himself back against her and she pressed back with her hands, hard.
“What?” he said.
“What?”
“What?”
“Never mind,” she said, standing up and sidestepping a bit as she did, with a small stumble that was either the Dew or nerves or both. “This is ridiculous. How old are you?”
Still Life with Bread Crumbs Page 13