If the Ice Had Held

by Wendy J. Fox

  After school, her friends did cheerleading or basketball, but she would sit in the library, or on nice days take her books to the park and read. When Melanie’s father was traveling, she liked to meet her mother at the bank where she worked as a teller, her fingers greased in glycerin from the tubs of pink Sortkwik, slips of deposit waiting for tally. Melanie would walk through the empty drive-up window and press the call button so someone would unlock the doors.

  To her, the bank was order. Drawers of currency, counted. Bags of coin, rolled. Her mother was head teller, so she was always there late with the cash drawers. It was quiet after hours, and there was something calming about her mother’s expert handling of money—the way she could, after years of practice, spot old dimes made of real silver or wheat cents, measure fifty-bill bundles by weight or by running her thumb along the edge of a stack. Her mother asked her if she knew why all of the presidents faced right on coin except for Abraham Lincoln’s mug on the penny. Melanie did not know.

  She came to love the incongruousness of it: someone who made just over clerk’s wages working through thousands of dollars with more expertise than the richest gangster. Her mother did not actually care that much for money, but had the lingo anyway: a hundred bills was a strap, a thousand a brick. Melanie learned the treasury colors; she liked the wrappers for the twenties and hundreds the best, violet and mustard. At school, they had taken a field trip to the Denver mint, and she had felt superior because she already knew about money in large quantities, moving quickly.

  At the end of a day, if her mother was in a good mood, they would walk home, arms linked, chatting. She would tell her about what she hated about school: her teachers, who were as interesting as a bar of soap, and how she had gotten in trouble for saying out loud that she thought studying American colonialism was boring.

  “They boiled shoe leather in the winter at Jamestown,” Melanie said. “I’d rather eat a dog.”

  “They had probably already eaten the dogs,” her mother said.

  “The map I drew of the settlement was mostly brown,” Melanie said. “I left some blank spots because there was also a lot of snow.”

  Her mother told her stories of trying to educate her elderly customers when policies changed and explained why she alone could not open the safe (because half of the employees knew the beginning of the combination, and the other half knew the end).

  When her mother was in a bad mood, they made their way down the sidewalk side by side, both staring at the pavement Melanie knew by heart—here was the square that looked like something heavy had been dropped on it; here was the one with the concrete cracked in the shape of a star.

  It was not too far, she learned, the space between happy and sad.

  At night her mother would peel off her stockings and rummage in the kitchen. The thing Melanie did not like about her father traveling was that it made her mother agitated.

  She wondered what the house had been like before her and what had been in her room, but she did not ask. Emptiness was the idea she liked most—the floors glossed and the walls a shell pink, the air kept fresh by a slow-moving ceiling fan.

  Once when her father was gone, they spent a week in school on Ponce de León arriving in Hispaniola and continuing on to Florida, searching. Pierced by an arrow anointed in poisonous sap from a manchineel tree, he took his last breath in Havana. Who cares, Melanie thought, but she colored the hand drawn map of the Caribbean anyway, making a hashed line to mark de Leon’s travels. In school they always drew maps, and Melanie’s mother saved them all in a poster tube in the hall closet.

  “It looks like a heart,” her mother said, putting beef roast with a crown of perfect onions on the table. Her father had not called, Melanie knew, because her mother slammed the pan.

  “It’s not,” said Melanie. “It’s just a circle and then he dies.”

  “He was the one who was looking for the Fountain of Youth, right?”

  “He didn’t find it,” Melanie said, rolling up the paper.

  “Thank God,” her mother said. “Who’d want to do this crap forever.”

  But on the next night, he did come home. The weather was nice, and so they had leftover roast sandwiches with horseradish on the patio. The earlies were in bloom, and the daffodils rimmed the yard like a corona.

  Melanie liked the way the food looked, spread on the glass table, and she liked it when her father was there with them. When he traveled, it was not only his body gone. There was less sureness in the house.

  * * *

  When she was in sixth grade, her parents sat her down on the center spot on the sofa and turned two chairs to face her. They would separate, they had decided, and the house would have to be sold. Her mother’s face was caved in, like bread punched down after it has risen. Her father looked like nothing, almost, a tiny fleck of flaked-off veneer. The house felt loose to her then, the years spent oiling creaks and tightening joists unraveled in a moment, the tiers of birthday cake and fluffy soufflés collapsed to wobbly floorboards.

  What is this place, Melanie wondered then, without us?

  * * *

  It was the first days after that were the hardest. The wind would blow and Melanie would feel it in every real and imagined crack in the house; she would feel it in her body. Her mother came home with banker boxes and rolls of tape; her father hit the road, off to Omaha, Topeka, St. Louis. A Realtor came and drove a sign into the front lawn. It was fall, and Melanie came home from school one day to the white post and the red letters of For Sale with the leaves swirling around the place where the stake had pierced the grass.

  She packed her things very carefully, wrapping even the softest items in a cushion of newspaper and a protective layer of cellophane tape. She filled the boxes slowly, labeling them with a permanent marker, and her mother did not rush her. It did not seem like there was much in her room, but it was surprising how much a small space could hold. When she was finally finished, her mother asked her to help with the rest of the house. Some things Melanie was instructed to pack, some she bagged for the Salvation Army. They also had a pile near the entryway that belonged to her father, mostly a heap of clothes and tools with a half-used tin of mineral oil on the top, leaking onto his old trousers.

  While Melanie was sorting knickknacks and wiping windowsills, it was hard for her not to catalog improvements that needed to be made: a loose screen, an almost imperceptible ding in the drywall. She wanted spackle and her screwdriver. She wanted her father to return from traveling with a sheaf of orders, her mother to core apples for a pie, and the three of them to set out repairing a bit of scratched hardwood, all on their hands and knees with putty knives and sandpaper, her parents stooped to a height close to her own.

  In the kitchen her mother was on a stool, loosing the philodendrons from their hooks, the vines in a coil in one hand like a lasso. It was terrifying to see the plants come down, the ceiling pitted and stained. As she stepped down to push the stool closer to the wall and then climbed it again to start on another section, Melanie heard her mother, under her breath, Goddamn you¸ goddamn you. It was rare for her to be angry like this, but even then Melanie knew. She was old enough to have already been stung—the kind of boys who talked her into showing her panties one day, her best friend the next, all while the meaner girls looked on, laughing.

  The tangle of ties and hex wrenches by the door was growing, and still they had not touched the garage. Melanie had trouble with the pile, half of which was just household junk her mother had decided belonged to her father. The pile was not like him. It was disorganized. She kept working. It was the first time she had moved and the first time her mother had moved in many years, so they were slow.

  She had a girl in her class who could take anything apart. Melanie herself had donated a cassette player she thought was ruined and an alarm clock that she had dropped leaving part of its guts exposed through the chipped plastic shell. This girl
returned the cassette player—reassembled and working—but pronounced the clock a goner. She did not really care so much about fixing things; she said she liked to understand how they worked.

  Melanie thought if she got this girl to help her take the house down board by board, they would not find the same answer, like a malaligned gear or dented soldering.

  In the living room, there was an end table that had not been packed and on the bottom shelf there was a bowl of restaurant matches. Melanie selected one of her favorites, a blue cover with match heads as silvery as snow. She squeezed the rest of the leaking mineral oil onto her father’s things and struck one of the phosphorus tips until it flamed. Her hands were shaking, but she managed to ignite the entire book and launch it onto the pile, the sheen of petroleum caught quickly. There was a whoosh as the oxygen sucked away from her.

  She inhaled heat and wondered if her father’s breath ever caught like this, ash on her face, ash in his lungs.

  When the smoke detector sounded, her mother came running, a torn philodendron vine laced through her fingers. There was a fire extinguisher still in the hall closet, and it took just a second to dampen the flames. They stood there for a minute while the foam settled around them. Melanie could see that the wall was stained black.

  The girl at school was not really her friend, but sometimes they ate lunch together, and when Melanie had gone to her birthday party that year, she was the only kid who showed up. The girl told her that day that her parents sometimes got angry at her, for example, when she had smashed the panel to the microwave to get inside. They thought she was violent and odd. They thought she should just use the buttons to heat up food, like everybody else.

  “Are you okay?” her mother asked. She held the cylindrical red can like a weapon, out in front of her, fingers gripped tightly. The smell of burnt synthetics was deadly, but her mother’s face looked more tired than anything.

  Melanie nodded, and she apologized. “Do you have any more boxes?” she asked. “We have a lot left.”

  “Sure,” her mother said. She tossed the extinguisher onto the smoldering heap and led Melanie to the garage. “You do the living room, and I’ll finish the kitchen.” She said there were a few things in the bathrooms, and then the movers would come, and they would be done.

  “I’m sorry about the wall,” Melanie said. “I could paint over it.”

  “It’s your father’s problem now,” her mother said.

  When the truck and the men came, they took their boxes and some of the furniture and all of the plants and left the rest in a mess.

  In the newspaper that came early, before the movers, her horoscope had said to “embrace change,” but she wanted to feel anger when she got into her mother’s car, driving away from the house for the last time, though she did not. She felt sad and in-between. They all loved the way the place had held them. Melanie was sorry for the scar up the wall, sorry for all the projects they would never finish. She was sorry for the way the light fell as they followed the bumper of the moving van, the house shadowed under a canopy of clouds.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Irene

  Summer, 1974

  Irene started with Sammy the summer before her freshman year, at the river, where all of the high schoolers met. Colorado was a dry place, but there were a few bends where water licked the shore. She wasn’t supposed to be there, or at any of the mid-July parties, but her father was working swing-shift again and she figured if she got home before he did, he’d be dead tired and not notice anything. She wasn’t sure if the other kids were there by permission or by lies, and she wasn’t sure who had found enough beer to fill a cooler. On foot, it took her a few minutes to cut across town and then another twenty alongside the highway before she dipped down to look for them. When she got to the place where the banks were broader, the group wasn’t hard to find, a ring of headlights and someone’s radio was going.

  It was an accident that she’d heard about the party. She had walked to the city park with its old, leaking pool, and then she had realized she was too old to swim there—it was only little kids in the water, so she looked for some shade to cool down in before she went back home. Sammy was eating his lunch at a picnic table. She knew him from junior high when she’d had a locker near his. Because the school was so small, everyone had classes together.

  He saw her too and called her name and waved her over, and she sat down across from him. Out of the direct sun, the sweat on her face started to cool.

  “I’m working at the stockyard this summer,” he said. “I lied to them, though, because I’m not sixteen yet, and you’re supposed to be sixteen. Just a couple more weeks and I don’t have to worry about them finding out. I think my birthday is the day after the job ends,” he said. He laughed and took a bite of his sandwich.

  “It’s probably nice to make money,” she said. “I wish I had a job. I’m bored.” There was a light breeze that blew against the damp of her shirt.

  “It’s not much of a job,” he said. “But I’m trying to help my folks.”

  “That’s good,” she said.

  Once, when she was in junior high, they’d been at a dance, and she wasn’t sure why she’d even gone. She’d attended the school her entire life, but she still hardly had a friend there. While she was trying to disappear into the wall, Sammy had asked her to join him for a slow song. It had been the first time she’d ever touched a boy, though a lot had changed since then. In the two years that had passed, she saw how boys saw her differently now. She saw herself differently, too.

  “Some people are getting together at the river tonight,” he said.

  “South of town?” she said—she was guessing. There were two main party spots she knew of, though, she’d never been to either one while anything was happening. She liked to walk and sometimes found smoldered out fires or beer cans floating in an eddy.

  “No,” he said. “North. Just past the Larimer’s place. You know it?”

  “Yes,” she said, and she did. The water hardly ran there, but there was a frontage road that came down off the highway and broad, well-packed dirt in a cluster of trees.

  “See you then, okay?” Sammy said, and he smiled at her, crumpling up the waxed paper from his sandwich and putting the ball in his lunch tin.

  By the time she arrived that evening, she was damp again from walking through what was left of the day’s heat, and her favorite jeans felt too tight. Most of the other girls were in shorts or skirts, and she felt soggy and self-conscious, scanning for Sammy and wondering if anyone would notice if she snagged a beer.

  She waited until it seemed like everyone was looking somewhere else, and then she lifted the lid of the cooler, though just as she did, she heard a male voice.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Oh, sorry, I thought it was for everyone,” she said, and popped the top of the can quickly and took a drink so he couldn’t make her put it back. When she turned, though, it was Sammy, lopsided grin and the same T-shirt he had been wearing at the park that looked like it needed to be washed. He was in jeans, too, ripped at the knees and frayed. All around, headlights were on, and from how many cans were already crushed on the banks, she thought it was good that the lights were on draining the batteries, and that no one had enough room to roll start, hopefully ensuring no one would drive drunk.

  Maybe it was the backlight from the cars or maybe it was the smell of the water and the way her shoes sunk gently into the ground that was softer towards the shore, but Sammy was more present than she’d ever noticed, eyes full and his posture open.

  “Did you walk here?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “We could have picked you up,” he said.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “I’ve walked a lot farther than here before.”

  He nodded, just as someone killed the lights that shone behind him. There were other headlights blazing, bu
t it took her eyes a minute to adjust, and when they did, Sammy was next to her, reaching for her free hand. His fingers were rough and warm. She felt a pressure on her foot and realized that he had accidentally stepped on her.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “No problem,” she said. She drained the last of the beer and tossed the can into the brush like everyone else seemed to be doing. Tomorrow, she would walk here again and remember to bring a bag with her to pick them all up.

  She leaned closer to him. She might not have any real friends, but Irene still knew how to be bold, and she got one arm around his hips. He was slimmer than her, she thought, and feeling the press of his pelvis against hers, she said his name.

  He was tall enough that he had to tip his head down to kiss her. More of the car lights had gone off, and she could hear the Platte, trickling. In the hazy dark, he led her to a place that was grassy and dry enough, and quickly, she felt his hand at her zipper, and then felt his bare chest against hers.

  She hadn’t expected to go so fast, but she didn’t mind. Afterward she curled into him while they listened to threads of conversation from the party, and then she said that she had to go, she had to get home.

  “I’ll walk you,” he said.

  “Thanks, but you don’t have to,” she said.

  “I want to,” he said, shaking his shirt out before pulling it on.

  She felt even stickier when she wriggled back into her jeans, and she needed to pee. By the time they made their way up the frontage road and back to the path of the highway, Sammy had put his arm around her, and he kept it there, all the way home, walking her to her front steps. The lights were still off, and she wanted to ask him to come inside, but she didn’t dare.