If the Ice Had Held

by Wendy J. Fox

  Even without her sisters in the house, it seemed just as cramped. As the boys grew taller, their massive feet spread into the space vacated by the sisters, and the drains still clogged with hair as they passed puberty and proceeded directly to balding, like their father.

  Kathleen was not sure what she wanted. Sometimes she passed her sister Rose, clerking at the grocery store, and sometimes she saw her sister Jeannette in line. Rose had graduated, just barely passing her final classes, but Jeannette had dropped out to get married, then her belly ballooned. Kathleen hadn’t heard much from Darlene since the visit. Even though she traced their steps in the house, wearing their old clothes, it did not feel sad to her that her sisters had moved out. She had Sammy, her brother, her first friend, and like her, he was doted on by their mother. They all had the orbit of their parents, save Darlene, states away. They swirled around them, and Kathleen admired the static of her mother and father, she admired their pull. Even when she saw old pictures of them, they seemed the same. Her mother was tired, always tired, and years later Kath would wonder what her mother would have been like if she had not had so many children, if she had not spent so many nights without sleep and a baby at her breast, sometimes two, like with her and Sammy when Kathleen refused to wean. When Rose or Jeanette came to visit, they scolded her for not helping their mother more, but her mother defended her.

  Kathleen was tall like her brothers, and she played basketball in the school’s gymnasium, her hair reaching down her back, dangling from a ponytail. The team was new, but their uniforms were castoffs from the boy’s C-squad. She guessed they were supposed to be grateful; some of the neighboring schools did not even give the girls uniforms, if they had teams at all. Wearing polyester with a sagging crotch was their toll for daring to train their bodies to be strong, a penance, like picking lentils from the fireplace.

  And even if Rose and Jeannette rolled their eyes at her, all the sisters except for Darlene, as she was the oldest, were used to other people’s clothes. Before their first match, Kath collected her team’s uniforms, and her sisters happened to be visiting, so they helped her drag out the old dressmaker’s tape and together with their mother they marked the uniforms in chalk, and cut down the shorts with pinking shears, cropped the tops to a slim tank. On her own bottoms, Kathleen made an extra slice on the edge of the side-seam.

  She liked the effect, even if a little bohemian, of the zigzagged edges. In their first game of the season, when she was fouled and took the line, to the dismay of her coach, even the slow bend to bounce the ball before her shot revealed her leg. Sore from the scissor’s handles, she wished she had had her fingers taped, but she heard her sisters and Sammy cheer as she swished each basket. They lost the game, but she played well, and Sammy walked home with her, giving her his jacket. He told her he knew she was doing a hard thing.

  “It’s just sports,” she said.

  “It’s more,” he said. “And you know it. I don’t even care about basketball, but I like watching you play. Mom probably would have been good, I’ll bet. Rose would be awful, though.”

  “Rose would be okay, she’s tougher than she looks,” Kathleen said. “Mom, though, I could see Mom being good on defense.”

  “She would be,” Sammy said. “I think she’d foul a lot though. Slappy.”

  Kathleen smiled at him, and she wanted to hold his hand, even though she knew they were too old for it, so she walked the rest of the blocks, shivering even in his coat. He put his arm around her and she leaned into him, her brother.

  For the second game, it wasn’t her idea to go shorter with the uniforms, but after practice one night, her team had sat in the park under the crunch of the drying autumn leaves, clipping and tearing until their uniforms were mostly thread. They used scissors and a hole punch and stitched on rhinestones someone had filched from her grandmother. Kathleen liked the circle of young women, giggling and punchy from the thrill of defiance and making the uniforms theirs.

  When they played again, their teenage bodies flashed on the court, like fish jumping in water, thighs exposed, the fabric just skimming the back of their butts. The away crowd rooted hard against them, and the referees had to stop to sweep bits of glitter and ribbon from the court. This time, they won, but they were all suspended for inappropriate dress. They couldn’t play in their modified uniforms, and the school said it had no budget to get them replacements.

  At home, when she told Sammy and her folks, she saw the anger rise in her mother’s face. Her mother understood.

  “There’s that law,” she said. “The nine law—what was it called? You have the right now. You go talk to the teachers.”

  Sammy agreed. “You’re right, tough on D,” he said to her later, when she went outside with him while he smoked one of their father’s cigarettes. “Mom’s right. Go to the teachers. The ladies.”

  The school librarian helped Kathleen with the text, and the art teacher gave her some heavy paper like stationery. She typed carefully:

  Dear Mr. Spencer,

  It has come to our attention your school may be out of compliance with the provisions of Title IX, which as you know can have significant impact on your school’s funding.

  Kathleen thought the letter looked homemade, like the dresses her mother sewed, but she made up a name to sign it, and the librarian’s sister posted it from the state capitol in Denver. Let Principal Spencer try to figure out if the funding threat was real or not. It had been two summers since the law passed, but no one had pushed him yet.

  While there was still some time left in the season, new uniforms, women’s uniforms, arrived. The colors were wrong, green and gold instead of blue and yellow, which made Kathleen think they were remainders or samples, but she didn’t care, because when they stood in the locker room mirrors, they looked like a team.

  It was in her crisp shorts and matching tall socks at a late season game that the whistle blew for no reason, and the coach and one of the referees approached Kathleen on the floor. For a minute she thought it was a late reaction to a push she had given a forward, she dreaded having to apologize to avoid a technical foul, but the whistle wasn’t for the game. The ref was just one of the parents, and she saw his face above the faded stripes.

  “It’s Sammy,” he said, guiding her by her elbow. “Go change.”

  * * *

  Winter had come quickly—she had felt it walking home with him—and the nights fell into a fast freeze, turning the river to a bridge of glossy ice. This early in the season even a light boy’s foot could crack it, the river still gushing underneath.

  * * *

  She would always remember how at Sammy’s funeral there was nothing to say; he was young, and he was gone before he could do much. She would remember that she wished she had reached for his hand that night they were walking home, even if she thought it was silly. She would remember the way that he was special was for small things, like gripping two strings of fence wire between the barbs and pulling one hand up and the other down to make a door for her to pass through so she would not snag her clothes when they cut through a field. The way his blue eyes were almost navy. The way when it was his turn to do the dishes, he almost always dropped something, and whenever they pulled out a newly chipped mug from the cabinet, they would examine it, shaking their heads at him. Even years later, when Kathleen would feel the smooth edge of a cup with a fleck of the finish missing its ceramic glaze, she would think of her brother, his rough hands deep in the suds.

  When she cleaned out the side of the room he had shared with Mikey, there was nothing but dirty clothes and magazine scraps. Her mother sat on the corner of his mattress so it sunk to the floor, her face ash, the same color as Sammy’s had been in the open casket, washed clean and cold. The carpet in the room was old and worn. Mikey had been sleeping on the sofa since the night they found Sammy. Kathleen’s father sat at the kitchen table chain-smoking cigarettes and putting ice in his whisk
ey to make it last longer.

  After the funeral, except for a few T-shirts Kathleen stashed in her drawers, they burned his clothes—too sad to save. Her father splashed used oil and tractor gasoline on the pyre of ripped jeans, a motorcycle helmet Sammy never had a bike to match with, and the shards of his own chipped mug he used to drink coffee from, even though their mother thought he was too young to drink coffee, until the fire grew so high and so bright they all thought it might take them and the house. Kathleen held her mother’s hand, and Rose and Darlene and Jeannette’s babies cried, and she understood that even if Sammy had not been perfect, or promising, or even nice all of the time, he belonged to them.

  He also belonged to the girl, with dark hair and hollowed eyes, who had cried into a soiled bandana, and who she recognized from school, wearing a black skirt and blouse at the service. There had been a handful of other kids, but this girl stood apart from them. Was Kathleen imagining the bump at her belly, the shine on her hair? She had never been in love, and thought if her brother had been, he would have told her.

  * * *

  She went over it again and again, how she had found Irene in between classes, just off school property, where the kids who smoked would congregate on breaks. There was a light and dirty snow on the ground. The girl had been easy to spot, a freshman, and glowing.

  Kathleen sat on the steps of the school, peeling her jacket off to feel the cold.

  “You’re going to get sick if you keep undressing outside,” she heard.

  “I’ll live,” she said, and turned. Irene.

  Irene sat next to her. Kathleen didn’t know what had changed, why the girl had come to her now, and she didn’t ask. She dug into her backpack for the extra lunch and handed it to Irene.

  They sat on the steps of the school, and they talked about Sammy and about Irene’s life. She lived with her father, and it sounded like he was not around much, working the night shift or sleeping, and Kathleen recognized her street as a place that had a reputation, fair or not, for being the bad part of town, but she could not say she had ever actually walked down it.

  She saw what her brother could have loved about Irene, her earnest face, the way she looked to the side when she was talking, her dark eyebrows. She wondered if her brother had seen this girl and wanted to pull her in. He would have known, like Kathleen did, that there was always room for one more; this was the imperfect blessing of a large family. Kathleen asked if they could meet the next day, and Irene looked away but said, All right, and Kathleen could not tell if the girl was distracted or if she was embarrassed to have been given the lunches and to have eaten everything but the crusts of the sandwich. Next time, Kathleen would remember to trim them off.

  That night she worried about how to get the girl to confess. She understood the consequences. If the school found out, they would make her leave, and her father might kick her out, so Kathleen started planning. It was just like the uniforms and the letter. She thought she could live at home for another year after high school, in a house with closets stuffed full of old infant clothes and the garage filled with boxes of toys, in a house that was impervious to children. Her father would still drink whiskey at the kitchen table, and her mother would still be tired, but they would have part of Sammy back. The other boys, Mikey, fourteen, and Thomas, thirteen (who they still thought of as the baby) would not be as used to a scream in the night or the low stink of the diaper pail, but they would survive.

  She wanted to hear that her brother Sammy had wanted the baby. She wanted to hear that he planned to take the GED and get a job, that he would support Irene staying in school.

  The next day, she tracked down Irene, and all she could do was grab the sleeve of her coat and hold on to it for a moment, saying, I know, okay, I know. She could not tell if Irene’s face was fear or relief, but the girl accepted another lumpy lunch bag, and they chewed through their food quietly, while the other students spun around them.

  In the following days when Kathleen couldn’t find her, she wasn’t sure if Irene was ditching school, or just hiding out again. Even with her own brothers and sisters, she had never felt such an urge to protect someone, had never known someone who seemed to need so much protection. Even Sammy, Sammy was gone, but it was from his own recklessness. She didn’t blame him, only accepted that there was nothing to do, no fingers to point, no if only—if only he wouldn’t have crossed the ice, but he did, and she couldn’t have stopped him. He’d likely done it before.

  Protection was for those left behind.

  Chapter Twelve

  Melanie

  Fall, 1986

  When she had been in fifth grade, they did their lessons in portable classrooms with squeaky walls and floorboards full of soft spots. She disliked, intensely, the school. In the spring and summer, her desk was always dusty because the classroom windows were left open, and the wind blew off of the Front Range in pressurized, howling bursts, carrying specks of grit, which Melanie was sure were made up of mostly dead moths and rotten leaves. Out of the windows they had a view of the Rockies, but she could live without it. She would rather have the glass tucked into the casements and the blinds down, to keep out the glare and the gusts. At school they told her she was lucky to live in a place like Colorado, where the sun shone often and the mountains kept watch over them, but all she had to do was look in any direction but west to see nothing but grass and flatland sprawl, and the Platte snaking pathetically along, with the same effect as when the boys peed into a dirt clod at recess and then jumped back so they would not get their own piss on their shoes.

  At school they said that if you asked a kid in a big city where meat came from that they would say, The Store, and so children in the west should feel proud they possessed more survival skills, more expertise in the natural. Melanie did not feel proud, and as far as she was concerned, meat did come from the store. They took a field trip to a ranch once, but it was not like her parents kept a beef cow in the backyard. Usually they got everything at a club grocery.

  Melanie thought it was boring, school, but she could not see what else she could do. She wanted to get on with it, but she understood she was a child and that part of being a child was years of waiting. At lunch, she ate in the cafeteria alone or with a friend and was depressed by the plastic trays and the plastic sandwich bags and the plastic smell of the food that had been either in the coat closet all day or recently scooped from a vat. It was hard not to feel like she was wasting her time. Every other Friday, hot lunch was pizza and maple bars, and these days were the worst because the entire school reeked of industrial pepperoni and fake syrup.

  The school was in a suburban spot outside of Denver with a tiny historic main street surrounded by low-slung suburbs. Her parents lived in a one-story ranch house with pretty shutters and clean eaves. They bought the house when they were newlyweds, and even as the years went by and they could afford more, they stayed, because they loved the rooms and did not want to move. Some of her best memories were of the improvements they made, months of sawdust that poofed around her and softened every edge—like her mother’s powder, or like glitter shaken from a jar. One year they put in another window in the kitchen to catch the early light, and her mother grew philodendrons in a line of clay pots on each windowsill. Her mother staked the vines until they were beyond the height of the walls, and then her father screwed hooks into the ceiling at tidy, six-inch intervals, each curve of tin cradling a rope of green. Kathleen watered faithfully and new leaves unfurled, the vines constantly reaching. It seemed important when it was time to mount a new hook. Her father would use his measuring tape for accurate distance, and little bits of the popcorn finish would scatter onto the kitchen tiles. Melanie remembered being lifted so she could pull the vine into its new support. It was like they had accomplished something. Another six inches, some proof that life was moving forward, even if it was only to the other side of the room.

  Sometimes, she was surprised
when she visited her friends’ homes and the kitchens were dark and wallpapered or decorated with roosters. She loved the lush of her family’s kitchen, and in the library at school, she learned that her mother’s houseplants were poisonous to cats. Melanie kept this as one of the many secrets an only child has. When she walked through the kitchen, rummaging for dry cereal or a glass of juice, she thought of the chemical danger and imagined herself feline, padding safely out of reach on a linoleum jungle floor while her mother cooked whole chickens in a Dutch oven, stewed eggplants.

  There were two small bedrooms, and a half bath off the master. The carpets had been replaced and the old wallpaper steamed off. Her parents helped her paint her room whenever she felt like it, and she went through coats of green, purple, cream, and finally yellow, taping the trim carefully and putting down a drop cloth to catch any errant blobs on the floor. She liked living there, the big backyard and her mother’s irises. There were fresh flowers all summer in a vase on the kitchen table, and in the winter, cuts from the philodendrons rooting in murky water.

  Her father traveled for work sometimes, enough that they missed him but not so much that they did not know him. He sold medical devices and this, to Melanie, seemed like a very important job, because what if your heart stopped and no one had the paddles to get it going again? Her father solved this problem. On nights he was gone, her mother would put on records, and they would sing along to Stevie Nicks or Carole King, waiting for their pork chops to finish.

  In the living room they had a comfortable sofa and a few chairs. Sometimes the three of them would sit on the sofa and watch television, Melanie nestled in the middle. Sometimes they would work on the house, small chores like replacing the peephole or reworking the hinges of a sticky door. She liked these jobs, sitting on a low work stool in the garage with her father, polishing a cabinet pull or greasing an old drawer slider with paraffin until the glide was perfect. She had her own screwdriver with a pink handle and a small hammer that her father taught her to hold correctly, with her palm in the wide part of the grip, low to the base, to get the most leverage.