“About every three then six months,” Randall says. “I have one when I get back.”
“Are you going to tell Diane where you’ve been?” she asks.
Randall sighs as they start walking away from the glaciers. “I’m planning on it,” he says, “but I guess it depends.”
“We could send her a postcard,” Gabrielle offers. Randall shakes his head and smiles. “It could just say ‘Come to Iceland.’”
“Just that? No slogan?” he asks.
They take turns coming up with slogan endings.
“Come to Iceland,” Gabrielle starts, sniffing the sulfur pools as they walk over them. “Where you can eat beans and no one will ever know.”
“Come to Iceland,” Randall says. “Where you won’t understand a damn word.”
“Come to Iceland,” Gabrielle adds. “No one else does.”
Randall has walked ahead of her a few yards and turns to face her. Suddenly she can see him living forever, remaining ice-fixed and well. Then, just as quickly, her father is only a spot, a red-and-black Gore-Texed figure on the white landscape ahead.
Defining Moments in the Life of His Father
Off Route 80 in Branford there’s a dead dog splayed out near the highway guardrail. Justin’s not sure his father saw the golden retriever as they pulled into the Laundry Land lot and headed to Benny’s A-Pizza, but Justin looked at the dog’s body from the passenger seat and again when he passed by the parked cars and Friday night litter that collected by the curb.
“Justin,” his dad said. And then when he didn’t respond, “You want eggplant?”
“Sure.” Justin nodded.
They always got the same kind in the hope that Justin’s sister, Alice, might actually eat something. Eggplant had been her favorite, and they’d taken a large pizza to the hockey rink where she’d played on the girls’ league back in high school. Since she’d come back from college after only one semester, she hadn’t eaten much of anything and stopped going to the games. The father still played spectator, cheering for Alice’s younger teammates, folding his slices and eating them down to the crust, then boomerang-shooting the dried ends into the open trash cans in back of the seats.
Alice stayed home. She liked to needlepoint and ordered kits from a catalog, pillows usually. The patterns were of the home-sweet-home sort, but Alice would change them, twisting the threads into whatever letters she felt like stitching. The living room now hosted rectangles, circular-shaped cushions, even a hexagon with gibberish yarn spellings: “Hip snurf herm,” “Whap Goof did Yop,” and one into which most of a question mark had been stitched but the bottom never finished and the bare netting scratched if you leaned on it too long. Justin would sit next to Alice, watching her fingers slide the needle up through each tiny square until she’d made an x in blue or gold and moved on to the next.
“It’s very satisfying,” she would say. On her middle fingers were red-chaffed marks from gagging. She knew Justin knew. She knew everyone knew, but she kept stitching and not eating or eating only popcorn or just licorice cut into pieces and then ridding herself of them.
This time when Justin came home for Thanksgiving break, the house was locked. He pitched some driveway pebbles up at Alice’s window, and she came down the stairs to let him in wearing her hockey jersey like a nightgown. Number 17 dwarfed her, her insect legs pressed against him when they hugged, and he tapped her clavicle in a strange brother-sister hello. Their father stood at the top of the stairs. He looked down at them as he gripped both sides of the banister, lifting his feet slightly, an aging gymnast ready to perform.
Justin tried to picture his dad as a kid, as a teenager, as a guy his age attempting to sleep with college girls, who felt impossibly remote, and he couldn’t. His father still slept in the same striped pajamas that he’d worn when his kids were in grade school, and this made Justin desperate, lost. He thought about buying his father new ones—maybe from that catalog that arrived every week or so in the mailbox and depicted families chopping trees together or roughhousing with their Labradors, ruddied and snow-cold as they tramped through some field. But Justin knew his father would just continue to wear the ones he had on now. And that was worse for Justin to think about: having to sort through his father’s things when he died one day and finding unopened pajamas in a drawer, having to donate them to someplace or get rid of them, although he knew that same catalog place had a lifetime return policy.
None of them said anything then, they just went to bed. The next day was Wednesday, and Justin asked Alice if she’d come watch her old team try to beat the New Haven Hooligans in that afternoon’s game. All the girls’ teams had ridiculous names, ones that tried to pound into everyone’s heads that girls could play hockey, could side-check and take a puck in the teeth just like boys. Alice’s team was the Whitby Wolverines, and darting out from each shirt belly was a toothy wolf snout, open as if about to consume the shirt number or the person inside.
“No thanks, Justin,” she said. “I have cooking to do besides.” She didn’t say besides what but showed him a magazine photograph of a bowl filled with stuffing, fake steam rising from the top of the cranberry-littered mound.
“You know,” Justin said, pointing to the puff of it, “I saw on a show once that the steam in food pictures is really smoke. They just put it there to make all the stuffing or burgers or whatever seem fresh-baked.”
Alice nodded in the way she always had, listening but not affected. “Interesting,” she said. “Have fun.”
“Go, team!” their dad shouted with a fist raised in the air. “Need anything special while we’re out?” he said, poking his head into the living room, where Alice sat with her feet tucked under her bagging sweater.
She shook her head, and Justin stood up. “You guys,” she said, as if Justin and their father had done something funny just by being there. Then she went back to her needlepoint, keeping the cooking magazine open in front of her.
Justin’s father drove toward Benny’s A-Pizza, pointing out construction sites and prime developments his son had only a mild interest in. A new middle school was set for groundbreaking in the spring, the old rectory was being converted into apartments. To keep conversation up, Justin asked about who got the contract, or what kind of materials might be used, and his dad told him. Tapping the wrong beat of the song on the radio, Justin’s dad asked about exams, if he liked his classes, if the dorms were well-heated in New Hampshire, and then said maybe he and Alice would take a trip up to visit in the spring.
They parked where there wasn’t a real space, half on the yellow line that marked the exit to Route 80 toward New Haven and half on the sanded slope of tarmac. They walked past Laundry Land and the dead dog body, which neither commented on. Inside the Laundromat, high school couples dressed in denim leaned on the dryers for warmth, with the hum and slosh of wet clothing as background noise.
Next door was Benny’s A-Pizza. The place was famous for its pies and calzones. After ordering, Justin’s father stood looking at the taped advertisements and flyers by the trash can. People put prices for cars, pets, or cleaning services, and medical researchers from the hospital nearby hung posters asking, “Are you an overweight smoker between the ages of 40 and 55?” or “Is your sixth to tenth grader too active? Out of control? Join our ADHD study and earn money while finding out the truth about your child’s condition.” Local bands pleaded for concertgoers, claiming the night would be “surreal.” Girls wanting babysitting positions handwrote their numbers on frayed bits of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven, and Justin’s father would sometimes tear one off and say, “Makes it look less pathetic, don’t you think?” The tooth gap of torn paper at least made it seem as if someone had read the misspelled ad, or thought about hiring. “People see one torn bit of paper and take one for themselves. Good business strategy—I’m just helping these girls out.”
Justin’s father paid for the pizza while his son stood looking out through the fogged sheet glass to the roadway, where he could sti
ll see the hump of dog lying. He knew that the next time he came here the body would be gone, and that he’d wonder then if some family mourned the loss of Buster or Sparky or whatever the thing’s name was or if they never even knew what had happened and just assumed the dog had run away, mating maybe, in the cold night.
Holding the cardboard box flat on his palms, Justin’s father opened the door by backing into it. They walked out into the cold night, anticipating pizza and pucks in the chill of the ice rink.
“Jesus!” his father spat out. “Where the hell’s the car?” Ahead of them, next to the Dodge where they’d parked, was just a gap that faced the dog body. It occurred to Justin that he’d been watching the whole time from the restaurant but hadn’t seen the car move anywhere.
“Who would steal it?” Justin asked. His father loved his car—not like a movie dad in the 1950s, but like a guy in an advertisement. He’d found the Saab convertible in the want ads years back—decent price, only fifteen thousand miles, life-guard-ring red. He’d paid cash and garaged it every night since, even in summer, to protect the paint from the slick of bug bodies, rain, dew, beer can scrapes from when the parties Justin’d thrown back in high school had filtered into the driveway. Two years ago, when she first started looking drawn, her lips chapped, shirts baggy, their father had offered Alice the opportunity of driving the car. She’d balked and then accepted, then passed out while admiring the fall foliage on Pike’s Path. Luckily, she’d been doing only twenty miles an hour, and she emerged with scrapes, one large facial laceration, and a broken toe. The front of the car was crushed, and despite the mechanic’s rehammering of it, and a touch-up job, the car was forever flawed. Not that their father registered this. He sucked his cheeks in when he first saw the damage and then shrugged it off. Justin truly believed that even now, when his dad went to the car first thing in the morning, warmed her in the winter and waxed the body in the spring, he didn’t notice her dents. “From the inside,” his dad said more than once, “she’s the same as when I first saw her.”
“Plenty of people would want to steal my car,” his father said in the parking lot and handed Justin the pizza. He began circling the lot, pacing with his fists in his pockets.
“It’s gone, Dad,” Justin said. He wanted to laugh but knew better.
“Did you see anything?” His father turned. Justin shook his head. “What were you doing in there then?” His father gestured back to Benny’s with his head. “Weren’t you looking right out here?”
“I guess,” Justin said. “But I didn’t see what happened to the car.”
They stood there smelling the eggplant pizza and growing colder as cars pulled in, picked up food or videos, and then left. Justin moved over to the guardrail and rested there, not putting all his weight on it just in case it toppled.
Suddenly his father was jumping up and down and waving like an aircraft director. “Jesus mother of God—will you look at that!” he fairly shouted and pointed across the double-lane roadway to the gas station at the intersection. Justin didn’t correct his father’s botched attempt at religious cursing. Under the turning gas sign, nosed up to the side of a building, was the car.
Still carrying the pizza, they crossed the highway to inspect, Justin unwillingly imitating his father’s great loping strides, the way his neck moved out and back like a pigeon’s.
“How could this happen?” His father laughed.
“No idea,” Justin said. “Maybe you didn’t set the hand brake?”
His father didn’t answer. He leaned down and checked the undercarriage, then felt the sides of the car as if it might speak. Justin wondered if he should worry about his father’s driving skills, then thought he remembered the squeal of the brake being set and thought maybe he should worry about the safety of the car.
“Amazing,” he said. “Not a scratch on her.”
Justin didn’t mention the other scratches, which were there from Alice’s accident; he just watched his father’s face as he looked from the car back to the highway, back to the pizza place and where both men stood in the empty air. His father didn’t say anything else—he patted the car and kept his hand on the roof for what seemed like a long time.
The Wolverines won that night, but Justin and his father didn’t end up going to the game. They got in the car and ate the cooled pizza there, facing the zip of headlights and tail reds that stopped then slurred along the highway. When they finished, they drove home and found Alice rinsing a large turkey in the sink. She explained the process of fast defrosting, how she had to keep changing the cold water in order to avoid giving them salmonella or some other food-borne illness. Justin hefted himself onto the counter and watched her fill, empty, then refill the sink. When their father came in at midnight, Justin thought they might tell Alice what had happened with the car, but they didn’t. Their dad kissed her cheek and said he was going to sleep.
Justin heard him up early the next morning, stacking chopped wood on the porch and then helping Alice lay the table for Thanksgiving. Justin showered and shaved even though they weren’t having company, and went to the garage, where they kept an extra pantry for storage. In the summer it held fruit or items from the farm stand down the road, but in winter they used it as an ice chest since the garage was unheated. Justin grabbed a quart of eggnog and nosed around the cabinet shelves for dry goods to take back to school. Once he’d found Alice, in a sundress, hair loose around her face, sitting on the floor here, shoving strawberries into her mouth until she’d finished at least a pound. When she’d chewed the last one and pocketed the green stems, she stood up and headed to the compost heap outside. She’d looked at Justin just before, and he’d been nervous, wondering if maybe she’d wanted him to follow, to watch her or clean up for her, but he’d stayed in the garage counting boxes of Rice-A-Roni and Hamburger Helper, its cartoon hand suddenly seeming severed and disgusting. Thinking about it now, he wondered if maybe that was the tiny dot of their relationship summed up.
Their father called down to ask for beer. Justin brought up a six-pack of Sam Adams and set it in the counter. Football narration filtered in from the den as Alice and her brother plated and served. Their father joined them at the table, sitting where he could still see the game in the next room.
Later, when Justin was hand-washing the plates, Alice puked up not only the acorn squash and dried fruit stuffing from Thanksgiving lunch but blood from her worn esophagus. Justin turned the faucet off and went to where their dad was standing, looking to where Alice leaned against the pedestal sink in the bathroom. Their father’s face had the same look as it had when he’d seen his car safe and moved across the highway—as if God had stepped in and performed the miracle of car preservation only to bestow a daughter who wrecked her own body and slumped, bleeding then, onto the white-tiled bathroom floor. Their father picked her up like a basket of laundry. Arms akimbo, Alice had her ankles crossed, a southern belle whose chin was speckled with blood.
“Jesus, you weighed more than this in fifth grade,” her dad said to her. He would have cried then, Justin thought, but some cheer from the television stadium burst out. Their father’s fingers went tighter into Alice’s ribs, and her sweater lifted just enough so they could see her stomach—or what should have been a stomach but had gone concave, covered with fine, downy hair. “You weighed more than this in grade school,” her father said again, and his voice slipped.
“I already weighed seventy pounds when I was ten? Gross.” Alice let her head flop to one side. Her father could reach around her lower thigh with his thumb-to-middle-finger grip.
All three went to the car, and Justin secured Alice in the back to make their way to the hospital. Justin tucked his fleece coat around his sister, and their dad handed back his parka, which she put on front to back; the high black collar made her look like a shriveled priest. Justin went to sit in the front seat, but Alice pulled his hand, and he sat back with her.
That spring Justin’s father called to tell him hockey season had ended
with the Wolverines as regional champs. Justin thought about how Alice had looked way back in high school—bulky in her hockey uniform, ruddy-cheeked and able—goal-scoring for her team. Then he thought about how his father had looked at Alice for the last time: blanketed in her hospital bed, her legs and arms spread slightly, making her whole form look like some thin, star-shaped ornament for the upcoming holiday season.
Justin thinks more about how his father looked then than about his own reaction, how he didn’t think about losing his sister until later, in the middle of portioning the funeral lasagna for his father to thaw and eat by himself. Only when Justin has to fill out some sophomore form for Dartmouth that queries about the names and ages of siblings does he realize that he is now an only child. With the tomato sauce ladle in one hand, Justin remembered the night they’d lost and found his father’s car. For the first time, he imagined the weight of it rolling across Route 80, headlights off, body silent as it slid into safety without accident. How it had emerged from the whole incident untouched but altered.
Eggs
At Imogen’s house the fridge is covered with magnets that say things like “A minute on the lips, forever on the hips,” but she and Lucy are allowed to eat nonfat Cool Whip straight from the tub with a spoon. Downstairs in the basement are murals that Lucy figures came with the house—eerie paintings from the 1950s, when the room held socials and sock hops. On the wall, flat men dressed for a hunt smoke pipes and wear green knickers. Wagging knee-height near their masters, flop-eared mutts point their tails toward the bar as if they want a scotch, too.
Imogen and Lucy take the imitation whipped cream, spoons, and a jar of Tang, and sit on the floor surrounded by the partying painted people. Sometimes they give them names and pretend to interact with them, but today the girls just dip their fingers into the orange powder and lick it off. Upstairs, Imogen’s mother is Jazzercising. They can hear the rhythmic thud of her ankle-high Reeboks on her floor, their ceiling.
The Girls' Almanac Page 13