The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories

by Connie Willis

  The outside door opened, and a gust of snowy air blew the papers out of her hand and out the door. She dived for them, but they whirled away in the snow. The man who had opened the door was already in the other elevator. The doors slid shut. Oh, for heaven’s sake.

  She looked around for a phone so she could call Brad and tell him she was stranded down here. There was one on the far wall. The first elevator was on its way down, between four and three. The second one was on six. She walked over to the phone, took both her gloves off and jammed them in her coat pocket, and picked up the phone.

  A young woman in a parka and red mittens came in the front door, but she didn’t go over to the elevators. She stood in the middle of the lobby brushing snow off her coat. Jill rummaged through her purse for a quarter. There was no change in her wallet but she thought there might be a couple of dimes in the bottom of her purse. The second elevator’s doors slid open, and the mittened woman hurried in.

  She found a quarter in the bottom of her purse and dialed Brad. The line was busy. The first elevator was on six now. The second one was down in the parking garage. She dialed Brad’s number again.

  The second elevator’s doors slid open. “Wait!” she said, and dropped the phone. The receiver hit her purse and knocked its contents all over the floor. The outside door opened again, and snow whirled in. “Push the hold button,” the middle-aged woman who had just come in from outside. She had a red, “NOW…or else!” button pinned to her coat, and she was clutching a folder to her chest. She knelt down and picked up a comb, two pencils, and Jill’s checkbook.

  “Thank you,” Jill said gratefully

  “We sisters have to stick together,” the woman said grimly. She stood up and handed the things to Jill. They got into the elevator. The woman with the mittens was holding the door. There was another young woman inside, wearing a sweater and blue moon boots.

  “Six, please,” Jill said breathlessly trying to jam everything back into her purse. “Thanks for waiting. I’m just not all together today.” The doors started to close.

  “Wait!” a voice said, and a young woman in a suit and high heels, with a large manila envelope under her arm, squeezed in just as the door shut. “Six, please,” she said. “The wind chill factor out there has to be twenty below. I don’t know where my head was to try to come over and see Brad in weather like this.”

  “Brad?” the young woman in the red mittens said.

  “Brad?” Jill said.

  “Brad?” the young woman in the blue moon boots said.

  “Brad McAfee,” the woman with the “NOW…or else!” button said grimly

  “Yes,” the young woman in high heels said, surprised. “Do you all know him? He’s my fiancé.”

  Sally punched in her security code, stepped in the elevator, and pushed the button for the sixth floor. “Ulric, I want to explain what happened this morning,” she said as soon as the door closed. She had practiced her speech all the way over to Ulric’s housing unit. It had taken her forever to get here. The windshield wipers were frozen and two cars had slid sideways in the snow and created a traffic jam. She had had to park the car and trudge through the snow across the oriental gardens, but she still hadn’t thought of what to say.

  “My name is Sally Mowen, and I don’t generate language.” That was out of the question. She couldn’t tell him who she was. The minute he heard she was the boss’s daughter, he would stop listening.

  “I speak English, but I read your note, and it said you wanted someone who could generate language.” No good. He would ask, “What note?” and she would haul it out of her pocket, and he would say, “Where did you find this?” and she would have to explain what she was doing up in the tree. She might also have to explain how she knew he was Ulric Henry and what she was doing with his file and his picture, and he would never believe it was all a coincidence.

  Number six blinked on, and the door of the elevator opened. “I can’t,” Sally thought and pushed the lobby button. Halfway down she decided to say what she should have said in the first place. She pushed six again.

  “Ulric, I love you,” she recited. “Ulric, I love you.” Six blinked. The door opened. “Ulric,” she said. He was standing in front of the elevator, glaring at her.

  “Aren’t you going to say something?” he said. “Like ‘I withspeak myself?’ That’s a nice example of Germanic compounding. But of course you know that. Language generation is your area of special study, isn’t that right, Sally?”

  “Ulric,” Sally said. She took a step forward and put her hand on the elevator door so it wouldn’t close.

  “You were home for Thanksgiving vacation and you were afraid you’d get out of practice, is that it? So you thought you’d jump out of a tree on the company linguist just to keep your hand in.”

  “If you’d shut up a minute, I’d explain,” Sally said.

  “No, that’s not right,” Ulric said. “It should be ‘quiet up’ or maybe ‘mouth-close you.’ More compounding.”

  “Why did I ever think I could talk to you?” Sally said. “Why did I ever waste my time trying to generate language for you?”

  “For me?” Ulric said. “Why in the hell did you think I wanted you to generate language?”

  “Because…oh forget it,” Sally said. She punched the lobby button. The door started to shut. Ulric stuck his hand in the closing doors and then snatched them free and pressed the hold button. Nothing happened.

  He jammed in four numbers and pressed the hold button again. It gave an odd click and began beeping, but the doors opened again.

  “Damn it,” Ulric said. “Now you’ve made me punch in Brad’s security code, and I’ve set off his stupid override.”

  “That’s right,” Sally said, jamming her hands in her pockets. “Blame everything on me. I suppose I’m the one who left that note in the tree saying you wanted somebody who could generate language?”

  The beeping stopped. “What note?” Ulric said, and let go of the hold button.

  Sally pulled her hand out of her pocket to press the lobby button again. A piece of paper fell out of her pocket. Ulric stepped inside as the doors started to close and picked up the piece of paper. After a minute, he said, “Look, I think I can explain how all this happened.”

  “You’d better make it snappy,” Sally said. “I’m getting out when we get to the lobby.”

  As soon as Janice hung up the phone Brad grabbed his coat. He had a good idea of what Old Man Mowen wanted him for. After Ulric had left, Brad had gotten a call from Time. They’d talkified for over half an hour about a photographer and a four-page layout on the waste emissions project. He figured they’d call Old Man Mowen and tell him about the article, too, and sure enough, his terminal had started beeping an override before he even hung up. It stopped as he turned toward the terminal, and the screen went blank, and then it started beeping again, double-quick, and sure enough, it was his pappy-in-law to be. Before he could even begin reading the message, Janice called. He told her he’d be there faster than blue blazes, grabbed his coat, and started out the door.

  One of the elevators was on six and just starting down. The other one was on five and coming up. He punched his security code in and put his arm in the sleeve of his overcoat. The lining tore, and his arm went down inside it. He wrestled it free and tried to pull the lining back up to where it belonged. It tore some more.

  “Well, dadfetch it!” he said loudly. The elevator door opened. Brad got in, still trying to get his arm in the sleeve. The door closed behind him.

  The panel in the door started beeping. That meant an override. Maybe Mowen was trying to call him back. He pushed the “door open” button, but nothing happened. The elevator started down. “Dagnab it all,” he said.

  “Hi, Brad,” Lynn said. He turned around.

  “You look a mite wadgetty “Sue said. “Doesn’t he, Jill?”

  “Right peaked,” Jill said.

  “Maybe he’s got the flit-flats,” Gail said.

 
Charlotte didn’t say anything. She clutched the file folder to her chest and growled. Overhead, the lights flickered, and the elevator ground to a halt.

  FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Mowen Chemical today announced temporary finalization of its pyrolitic stratospheric waste emissions program pending implementation of an environmental impact verification process. Lynn Saunders, director of the project, indicated that facilities will be temporarily deactivized during reorientation of predictive assessment criteria. In an unrelated communication, P B. Mowen, president of Mowen Chemical, announced the upcoming nuptials of his daughter Sally Mowen and Ulric Henry, vice-president in charge of language effectiveness documentation.

  Just Like the Ones We Used to Know

  The snow started at 12:01 a.m. Eastern Standard Time just outside of Branford, Connecticut. Noah and Terry Blake, on their way home from a party at the Whittiers’ at which Miranda Whittier had said, “I guess you could call this our Christmas Eve Eve party!” at least fifty times, noticed a few stray flakes as they turned onto Canoe Brook Road, and by the time they reached home, the snow was coming down hard.

  “Oh, good,” Tess said, leaning forward to peer through the windshield. “I’ve been hoping we’d have a white Christmas this year.”

  At 1:37 A.M. Central Standard Time, Billy Grogan, filling in for KYZT’s late-night radio request show out of Duluth, said, “This just in from the National Weather Service. Snow advisory for the Great Lakes region tonight and tomorrow morning. Two to four inches expected,” and then went back to discussing the callers’ least favorite Christmas songs.

  “I’ll tell you the one I hate,” a caller from Wauwatosa said. “‘White Christmas.’ I musta heard that thing five hundred times this month.”

  “Actually,” Billy said, “according to the St. Cloud Evening News, Bing Crosby’s version of ‘White Christmas’ will be played 2150 times during the month of December, and other artists’ renditions of it will be played an additional 1890 times.”

  The caller snorted. “One time’s too many for me. Who the heck wants a white Christmas anyway? I sure don’t.”

  “Well, unfortunately, it looks like you’re going to get one,” Billy said. “And, in that spirit, here’s Destiny’s Child, singing ‘White Christmas.’”

  At 1:45 A.M., a number of geese in the city park in Bowling Green, Kentucky, woke up to a low, overcast sky and flew, flapping and honking loudly, over the city center, as if they had suddenly decided to fly farther south for the winter. The noise woke Maureen Reynolds, who couldn’t get back to sleep. She turned on KYOU, which was playing “Holly Jolly Oldies,” including “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and Brenda Lee’s rendition of “White Christmas.”

  At 2:15 A.M. Mountain Standard Time, Paula Devereaux arrived at DIA for the red-eye flight to Springfield, Illinois. It was beginning to snow, and as she waited in line at the express check-in (she was carrying on her maid-of-honor dress and the bag with her shoes and slip and makeup—the last time she’d been in a wedding, her luggage had gotten lost and caused a major crisis) and in line at security and in line at the gate and in line to be de-iced, she began to hope they might not be able to take off, but no such luck.

  Of course not, Paula thought, looking out the window at the snow swirling around the wing, because Stacey wants me at her wedding.

  “I want a Christmas Eve wedding,” Stacey’d told Paula after she’d informed her she was going to be her maid of honor, “all candlelight and evergreens. And I want snow falling outside the windows.”

  “What if the weather doesn’t cooperate?” Paula’d asked.

  “It will,” Stacey’d said. And here it was, snowing. She wondered if it was snowing in Springfield, too. Of course it is, she thought. Whatever Stacey wants, Stacey gets, Paula thought. Even Jim.

  Don’t think about that, she told herself. Don’t think about anything. Just concentrate on getting through the wedding. With luck, Jim won’t even be there except for the ceremony, and you won’t have to spend any time with him at all.

  She picked up the in-flight magazine and tried to read and then plugged in her headphones and listened to Channel 4, “Seasonal Favorites.” The first song was “White Christmas” by the Statler Brothers.

  At 3:38 A.M., it began to snow in Bowling Green, Kentucky. The geese circling the city flew back to the park, landed, and hunkered down to sit it out on their island in the lake. Snow began to collect on their backs, but they didn’t care, protected as they were by down and a thick layer of subcutaneous fat designed to keep them warm even in sub-zero temperatures.

  At 3:39 A.M., Luke Lafferty woke up, convinced he’d forgotten to set the goose his mother had talked him into having for Christmas Eve dinner out to thaw. He went and checked. He had set it out. On his way back to bed, he looked out the window and saw it was snowing, which didn’t worry him. The news had said isolated snow showers for Wichita, ending by mid-morning, and none of his relatives lived more than an hour and a half away, except Aunt Lulla, and if she couldn’t make it, it wouldn’t exactly put a crimp in the conversation. His mom and Aunt Madge talked so much it was hard for anybody else to get a word in edgewise, especially Aunt Lulla. “She was always the shy one,” Luke’s mother said, and it was true, Luke couldn’t remember her saying anything other than “Please pass the potatoes,” at their family get-togethers.

  What did worry him was the goose. He should never have let his mother talk him into having one. It was bad enough her having talked him into having the family dinner at his place. He had no idea how to cook a goose.

  “What if something goes wrong?” he’d protested. “Butterball doesn’t have a goose hotline.”

  “You won’t need a hotline,” his mother had said. “It’s just like cooking a turkey, and it’s not as if you had to cook it. I’ll be there in time to put it in the oven and everything. All you have to do is set it out to thaw. Do you have a roasting pan?”

  “Yes,” Luke had said, but lying there, he couldn’t remember if he did. When he got up at 4:14 A.M. to check—he did—it was still snowing.

  At 4:16 Mountain Standard Time, Slade Henry, filling in on WRYT’s late-night talk show out of Boise, said, “For all you folks who wanted a white Christmas, it looks like you’re going to get your wish. Three to six inches forecast for western Idaho.” He played several bars of Johnny Cash’s “White Christmas,” and then went back to discussing JFK’s assassination with a caller who was convinced Clinton was somehow involved.

  “Little Rock isn’t all that far from Dallas, you know,” the caller said. “You could drive it in four and a half hours.”

  Actually, you couldn’t, because 1-30 was icing up badly, due to freezing rain that had started just after midnight and then turned to snow. The treacherous driving conditions did not slow Monty Luffer down as he had a Ford Explorer. Shortly after five, he reached to change stations on the radio so he didn’t have to listen to “those damn Backstreet Boys” singing “White Christmas,” and slid out of control just west of Texarkana. He crossed the median, causing the semi in the left-hand east-bound lane to jam on his brakes and jackknife, and resulting in a thirty-seven-car pileup that closed the road for the rest of the night and all the next day.

  At 5:21 A.M. Pacific Standard Time, four-year-old Miguel Gutierrez jumped on his mother, shouting, “Is it Christmas yet?”

  “Not on Mommy’s stomach, honey,” Pilar murmured and rolled over.

  Miguel crawled over her and repeated his question directly into her ear. “Is it Christmas yet?”

  “No,” she said groggily. “Tomorrow’s Christmas. Go watch cartoons for a few minutes, okay, and then Mommy’ll get up,” and pulled the pillow over her head.

  Miguel was back again immediately. He can’t find the remote, she thought wearily, but that couldn’t be it, because he jabbed her in the ribs with it. “What’s the matter, honey?” she said.

  “Santa isn’t gonna come,” he said tearfully, which brought her fully awake.

  He
thinks Santa won’t be able to find him, she thought. This is all Joe’s fault. According to the original custody agreement, she had Miguel for Christmas and Joe had him for New Year’s, but he’d gotten the judge to change it so they split Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, and then, after she’d told Miguel, Joe had announced he needed to switch.

  When Pilar had said no, he’d threatened to take her back to court, so she’d agreed, after which he’d informed her that “Christmas Day” meant her delivering Miguel on Christmas Eve so he could wake up and open his presents at Joe’s.

  “He can open your presents to him before you come,” he’d said, knowing full well Miguel still believed in Santa Claus. So after supper she was delivering both Miguel and his presents to Joe’s in Escondido, where she would not get to see Miguel open them.

  “I can’t go to Daddy’s,” Miguel had said when she’d explained the arrangements, “Santa’s gonna bring my presents here.”

  “No, he won’t,” she’d said. “I sent Santa a letter and told him you’d be at your daddy’s on Christmas Eve, and he’s going to take your presents there.”

  “You sent it to the North Pole?” he’d demanded.

  “To the North Pole. I took it to the post office this morning,” and he’d seemed contented with that answer. Till now.

  “Santa’s going to come,” she said, cuddling him to her. “He’s coming to Daddy’s, remember?”

  “No, he’s not,” Miguel sniffled.

  Damn Joe. I shouldn’t have given in, she thought, but every time they went back to court, Joe and his snake of a lawyer managed to wangle new concessions out of the judge, even though until the divorce was final, Joe had never paid any attention to Miguel at all. And she just couldn’t afford any more court costs right now.

  “Are you worried about Daddy living in Escondido?” she asked Miguel. “Because Santa’s magic. He can travel all over California in one night. He can travel all over the world in one night.”