by Abi Maxwell
“He gets them straight from the dealer,” he said on the way home. “For cheap. It occurred to me one day.”
He reached for his bottle then. They were at the crest of the hill, the east side of the Shaws’ house still visible in the rearview mirror. By the time her father mustered the courage—or whatever it was that took—to bring the bottle to his lap, they had coasted downward a distance and were near the lake. Alice’s father steered with his knee while he pulled the cork out. He took a swig and then in a rush held it in her direction. Sweat covered her hand as she took hold of it. She tilted it to her lips but kept them closed, so none of the liquid entered her mouth. Only that sweet and brisk smell of her father, and a taste of the Carmex he rubbed on his full red lips. She handed the bottle back and the lake opened up before them, so vast and dark it looked like nothingness itself.
Alice’s father had a habit of making a good, fast friend and keeping him for a few months, sometimes a year or two. Never a lifetime. Weekly he would go see these friends. Sometimes they would even spend holidays together. Mike Shaw became one of these friends, only this time, Alice was a part of the friendship.
They would arrive in the evenings, after her father picked her up late from school. Along those back roads and through the gray winter they would drive, silent. Though she knew the spot where the road curved sharply to reveal ahead that tall, looming house at the end of the tunnel of pine, each time the house appeared it seemed a shock.
Mike Shaw and Alice and her father would sit in their straight-backed, cushioned chairs in the parlor while a fire crackled behind them. Between them sat a copper table like none she had ever seen outside this room. Upon that table were olives and sharp cheese, sometimes shrimp and cocktail sauce, always a bucket of ice, and books, so many books. The liquor the men kept at their feet—Alice learned here that Mike Shaw preferred scotch, and her own father bourbon. Alice drank glass after glass of ginger ale, which June kept filled.
“June,” Mike would call, when the ice or crackers or Alice’s drink had run out. Sometimes Mike would look at Alice’s father, wink, point his chin toward the kitchen, and say quietly, “Go on in there and fix her up, Paul. Make her laugh.” Because June wasn’t a part of this group. She stayed in the kitchen, loading the woodstove, sweeping across the room, stirring a pot of this or that—Alice never knew what, but would, for the rest of her life, recall that scent of garlic, sauerkraut, and sweet cream. In this way June would float, always in a thin dress that seemed out of place for winter. Her hair was thin and blond and she kept it tied in a loose bun at the base of her neck. To Alice, June seemed foreign. She wasn’t—Alice had asked her father once, and he had roared with laughter. But she seemed that way, seemed as though this country was new and strange to her. It was the way she skittered in her own house, nervous about whether the place she set the bucket of ice down was right or not. She didn’t bump into any doorways or the backs of any chairs, but always she seemed as though she just had. Even her communication didn’t come out as full English, but as nervous strides toward a language. “More?” she would say, and point with trepidation at Alice’s glass. “Ice you want?” It unnerved Alice, June removed like this, but that was their way, Mike Shaw’s way. If she had been married to Mike Shaw, Alice thought then, she would have given him his way, too.
The men liked to talk about Steinbeck and Hemingway, and Alice’s father would have gladly gone on without hearing her opinion, but not Mike Shaw.
“Tell me which books you’ve read,” he would say.
Alice had read all these books, her father’s favorite books. She stayed up late to read them.
“And which is best?”
She took a risk, offered one they hadn’t said. “The Catcher in the Rye,” she announced.
“Teenagers,” her father scoffed.
Mike Shaw leaned back then, and drew in a long breath. He shook that angular glass and tipped it to his dark face to coax the last ice cube into his mouth. After that he took his time coming to his feet. He crossed the room and went to the built-in bookshelves on the far wall. From the highest shelf he grabbed Alice’s favorite book, and flipped through the pages. She watched him inhale that impossibly clean but dust-like smell of a good old book.
“She’s right,” he said, and dropped the book in her father’s lap. “The man can tell a story.”
“That’s right, too,” Alice’s father said, and gulped at his drink.
Besides skiing and books, the men liked to talk about sailing. “Men talk,” June once whispered in Alice’s ear as she filled her drink, but Alice ignored her. At the time, the men had been trying to recall the title of a particular book.
“Kon-Tiki,” Alice said. She hadn’t read that one, but she pretended.
“You’re right,” Mike Shaw said. “You’re smart for your age. How old are you?” he asked, and walked across the room, to the fireplace. On the mantel was a framed picture of his two sons standing atop the ski hill on a gleaming blue day. He brought the picture to Alice. “Todd,” Mike Shaw said, pointing to the taller one, and then, to the other, “and Scott. We send them away for school. June doesn’t like it but I say it’s good for them. Give them a little independence.” He untucked his shirt, dusted the picture with its corner, and turned to Alice as he said, “They’re good boys. Are they too old for you?” He turned back to the picture and stood there completely still, and then he looked abruptly at Alice’s father, gave a little wink and laugh, and said quickly, “Am I too old for you?”
The first time Mike Shaw called their house, Alice was in the kitchen. She picked up the telephone and without announcing himself Mike simply asked her, “How are the skis?”
“Good,” she said. She stretched the phone down the hall and into her bedroom, and shut the door. It was a wonder she did this so quickly. As though she had expected him to want to talk. As though she had prepared for it. “I don’t have to push so hard for a turn,” she said.
He asked her if she was winning any races.
“No.”
“I don’t know that it’s worth it. Run, lift, takes all your time. Better you do something else. You have a boyfriend?” That last question, he asked it plainly, an afterthought. Alice told him she did not.
“Call me if you ever have any questions,” he said. “About skiing.”
“Okay.”
“Or anything.”
It was the first of many phone calls. Sometimes Alice would call him, and if June answered, Alice would hang up. But that didn’t happen often, because she always took the telephone into her room at eight o’clock, and nearly every time, Mike Shaw called, just when she expected him to. They talked about skiing and they talked about books and Mike Shaw talked about the horrors of an ordinary life.
“Promise me you’ll never drive a minivan,” he said, and Alice believed she understood just what he meant.
“Your father is a good man,” he said one time. “Not like me.”
“You are good,” she told him, and how fully she had meant that. To lift her up out of her lonely life, to make her feel she belonged, yes. “You are good,” she repeated.
When Mike Shaw offered Alice a drink, she looked to her father for some advice, approval or not, though she knew nothing would come. Her father was at least ten years older than Mike Shaw, but in this man’s house he became something small and unsure. Right now his eyes were cast upon the copper table. Alice imagined Mike Shaw taking her as his lover right there, across that table. Sometimes she imagined the two of them in the snow. She let his hand brush hers as she took the drink.
“Seven and seven,” he whispered. “Don’t let June catch that.”
She drank it slowly, astonished by the hot path the liquid carved into her belly. It didn’t make her feel dizzy or sick, as she had imagined it would, or like she wanted more, as the teachers at school had warned. It only entered her and remained, a small, secret confidence that she held. I am grown-up. I enjoy a drink. Never did she have more than one ice-filled
glass.
But those drinks did certainly change her. No longer did she worry over what her peers thought. She looked into people’s eyes and she said firmly what she meant.
“I’m going out tonight,” she said to her father, and walked to the pier to meet Mike Shaw. Dry snow, the kind that would never accumulate, whipped along the frozen lake. Out across the way she could see a strip of darkness darker than the rest. Bear Island, she knew. Alice had never been there but frequently she imagined that island alive with all the ghosts of those lake people who had settled there nearly a century ago. Back when she was young, in the days when her father would tuck her into bed, he had told her the stories of those people, insisting that they still could be seen. Ida’s widower, hovering beneath the ice with his window on a clear, still day; Eleonora at the tip of Bear Island with a lantern that shone like a pack of fireflies, just trying to stay warm. Over those stories that he would tell her Alice always felt some special claim, as though by the lake and its people she alone had been chosen. To be called so clearly into the water, to drop in and resume some watchful life with those people who lasted beneath—she could not help but imagine that. For that is what the lake people were to her—in all their stories, each of them had seen their fate before that fate came to pass. Nothing, not even death, had been illusive. Nor had anything been absolute. Alice wanted that.
“That’s because you come from those people,” Mike Shaw had said. She didn’t know what he meant, but when he said that, Alice felt she had been seen.
Alone in the cold night she stood there waiting for him. A wind soared across the ice and curled up at her feet and sent her hair trailing like a river. As night moved on, that same wind began to howl like a solitary loon. He never did show up. Eventually she walked home and told her father that she and her boyfriend had watched a movie.
Sometimes they talked on the telephone about all the places in the world they would one day go. Sometimes they only held the phone to their ears, silent. “If you were my age,” Mike Shaw said once, and also, “Once this wait is over.” Alice wrote these sentences down in her journal, along with her very first love poems.
“I’ll be damned,” Mike Shaw said one evening. Alice’s father’s bottle of bourbon had long since run out, and now Mike held his own empty bottle of scotch at eye level. A wind rattled the old storm windows and found its way into her lap. “June,” Mike Shaw called.
June came to the door and with the back of her hand wiped stray clumps of hair from her forehead. A dish towel hung from her fingertips.
“No more,” she told him.
“Tomorrow, then,” Alice’s father said.
“No,” Mike Shaw said. “We’ll just run to the Spot.” That was the little store on the lake, just down the hill from the Shaws’ house. He slapped his thighs and came steadily to his feet and he walked through the doorway as though no one—especially not a woman he loved—stood there. This cast June tight against the wood frame. Past her like this, without a word, Alice and her father walked.
Though still no good snow had collected, Alice would remember that winter as one of bitter cold, that night so clear and crisp that she could have taken a knife and cut out squares of the air itself to store in her pocket. Mike Shaw opened the driver’s door of his car, and her father opened the passenger’s. Alice headed for the backseat, but shivered and remembered her coat.
“My jacket,” she said when she entered the kitchen. June already had it in her arms. Rather than hand it to her, she held it up high, so that Alice had to turn around and ease herself into place. Once this was complete June placed her hands on the girl and turned her around.
“No hat,” she said, and “Zip,” she ordered. Alice did, and when she let go of the zipper June reached forward and cinched it up just a bit more. Then she stepped back and held a steady gaze on the girl. There was alcohol in her, and this felt somehow revealed as June stared. Yet June held no meanness in her look. No kindness, either, nothing but June staring into Alice and Alice staring into June for one long moment. Suddenly the woman shook her head and touched her palms to Alice’s cold cheeks. When she released her hold, Alice returned outside.
“Take the front seat,” Mike Shaw said. “Your father’s gone into the barn.” She didn’t ask questions. Mike’s skis, his pictures and medals, all of it—she knew it was stored in the barn. A light from the barn loft switched on, and as Mike Shaw put the car in reverse that light switched back off. Yet as the car backed out of the driveway, Alice gave no protest.
Later this moment would come to her as a tunnel whose sides suddenly fell open to reveal the great wide and growing universe. Snow had begun to fall, and lit up in the headlights those flakes looked like a galaxy that they drove farther and farther into. Yes, that was it. Alice had moved through that galaxy thinking the tunnel they carved marked the limits, but then the lights had gone out and a greater expanse had opened. There was sadness in that expanse, and regret, but there was also a real, true touch. For a moment there was. She would hold fast to that, and then move on to what her father must have done in the barn. How he must have picked up an old ski, angled it down, and pressed upon its middle. How he must have felt warm, for a time, and satisfied.
In the car, she didn’t put her seat belt on. And Mike Shaw was drunk, of course, and she should have been scared to crash into a tree, to lose her leg or her entire life, but she wasn’t. Which turned out to be fine.
As she would later imagine her father to be, Alice also felt warm that night. Her shoulders were relaxed, her hands comfortable in her lap. From the corner of her eye she watched Mike Shaw’s shape, each deliberate shift he made, watched his loose but sure hands on the wheel. He cleared his throat and the sound replayed itself in her head. They weren’t talking. Only riding quietly on a dark dirt road. Riding as a man and a woman did, should, she thought then. Though this man, she realized, didn’t fill the car with any scent. Not even that of scotch.
“Reach into that glove box,” he told her, and quickly pointed his chin toward it. It was a motion he frequently made. To Alice it said that under Mike Shaw’s sharp instructions, life would be right. She did as she was told, feeling around for a way to open the box, but before she figured it out he reached over and opened it himself. There was a gun in there, she saw that, though she said nothing. Also a pouch of tobacco, and this he removed. In it were a few cigarettes he had already rolled. “Light this for me,” he said. She did, her first drag ever. The paper end ripped a little and a string of tobacco stuck to her wet lips. But she didn’t cough. Alice knew enough not to cough. She handed him the cigarette. He smoked, and after a few puffs held it out between the seats for her to take again. She pretended that she had taken a cigarette a thousand times before. Mike Shaw breathed loudly and let his head tip back against the seat.
When the trees gave way it was to the lake. Here, at the end of the dirt road, was also the store. Though all the lights of the place were off, he pulled the car into the small lot, cut the engine, and left his headlights on. These lights created a tunnel of barren ice, and at the very far end of the tunnel she could see the dark edge of Bear Island. He must have known, she would realize later. June, too. They must have known the store would be closed.
Mike Shaw reached down and pulled a lever, and in a rush his seat rolled back. With a loud breath he stretched his legs out, patted his thighs. He smoked his cigarette lightly, not like he needed it but like it offered him some small pleasure.
“You know how hard it is yet?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“You’re smart for your age,” he told her. “For any age I suppose.” The cold air that came into the car felt good, fresh. As did sitting there, talking with Mike Shaw, who had chosen her. When a truck drove by she tensed, but Mike did not. He only switched the lights off and unrolled his window all the way. It was teenagers in the truck, and they slowed down to throw beer cans out the window and hoot. To this Mike Shaw opened his car door, dropped his cigarette, and stepped
on it. Then from the ground he picked up one of the crushed beer cans the boys had thrown and like a rock skipped it toward the lake. When he closed the door of the car again, he reached into his pocket and withdrew a flask, handed it to Alice. It was nearly full.
“When you get married,” he said. “Or maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you’ll use that brain of yours and understand what’s right for a man and what isn’t.”
“I won’t marry,” she said. (She would, of course, more than once, the first in not too long a time. And it would be to a good-enough man, though not a man entirely unlike Mike Shaw. A man who, like Mike Shaw, had more than a decent amount of himself. A man who won races and women, a man who would wander. And she would wonder whether she should have chosen another, chosen a man with softer, much softer hands.)
“Don’t,” Mike Shaw said. Her teeth clenched and in the darkness her legs began to shake with cold. Soon her whole body shook. “It’s all work and doing this and doing that,” he said. “None of it is important. When I used to ski,” he said.
“You still can ski.”
“That’s what I like about you.” He put his hand on her head. A father may have put his hand there like that. Not her father, but a father. “I used to feel so a part of it all,” he said.
Alice didn’t respond. Which, for Mike Shaw, turned out to be the right thing. In the silence his hand moved down from her head to her shoulder, then across her arm, onto her thigh. She took one long gulp from the flask. By the time his rough-bearded face breathed warm air against her cheek, the alcohol had opened and spread in her stomach. Though she could no longer see the island before her, she kept her vision fixed in that direction. The flicker of a light at its tip, for a moment she thought she saw that, though it may have been a trick of the eye. What happened happened quickly. In too quick a time to eat dinner, do math homework. But had it been a ski race, and had Alice followed behind another skier, crossing the finish line after him, with the time between the skiers the same as the time it took what happened to happen, the winner would have taken first place by a considerable amount. This she knew. Of course she had been a virgin. Mike Shaw started the car and they returned to that tall house in the road.