Vastation. The word saved me, as words always have, and I could stir again, and stir I did, charging up the eastern loop of the trail back like a bat out of hell. I hiked uphill too fast for comfort, for I wasn’t after comfort, I was outrunning the beast in the jungle. In no time I was thirty feet above the chasm floor, hastening up the rocky rim, actually looking forward to rejoining Abigail and Conrad, and then I heard them clearly, close by. I couldn’t see them anywhere, yet their voices reverberated as though they were indoors, in a tiled room.
“I know what I’m doing,” my sister was saying. “I told you. We came here all the time.”
“What’s on the other side?” he asked.
“Come and see. Come on.”
There was a long silence. “Where’s Dorcas?” he asked.
“She’s fine. She knows her way around here. Come over here, with me.”
“I’ll just wait here. Take your time.”
They sounded almost amiable. I pretended, briefly, that their constant poisonous animosity was an act for my benefit, to keep me busy; that they were secretly the fondest of lovers.
“You’re scared,” said my sister. “You’re afraid to come in here with me.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“You’re actually afraid.”
“I’m bored stiff.”
Abigail snickered. “Hardly stiff. Hardly that.”
“Go to hell.”
“What’s the matter with you now? Claustrophobia?”
By the sound they were close enough to touch: I heard him take a deep drag on his Marlboro; I heard the flicked stub snap against stone. Were they underground, beneath my feet? I walked out to the edge of an overhanging rock and peered around. I couldn’t spot them anywhere below, and they couldn’t very well be hiding in the trees at my back.
“Did she stuff you in a closet? Bury you alive?” Abigail sighed heavily. “If you don’t tell me, I won’t know, will I?” Abigail’s tone was remote, cool. She sounded like a therapist on autopilot.
“And just exactly why do you want to know?” His speech was beginning to slur. “You got a plan, sweetmeat?”
“I got a deal, lover. The deal is, you talk to me. We try to work through all your—”
“The deal is. The deal the deal the deal the deal. You kill me.”
She swore under her breath. “All right, I’m coming back. Move out of the way, please.”
There was a shuffling sound, the sound of nylon fabric whispering against stone, and I realized where they had to be: the Lemon Squeeze, a twenty-foot spherical rock split clean down the center, leaving just enough space for a child or a slender adult to edge through. At its far end was a sharp drop. When we were kids I used to slip through it all the time. Abigail never fit. In recent times they started calling it “Fat Man’s Misery,” but that’s a day-tripper name. It’s the Lemon Squeeze.
They were indeed below where I stood. I’d have to walk ahead and double back under to see them. I really didn’t want to do this.
“Do you mind? Would you please move? I can’t get by.”
“Fat-ass.”
“Idiot. Twiggy couldn’t get by you.”
“Go the other way.”
“The other end is impossible. It’s just a sheer drop.”
“What a fucking shame.”
“Which you’d know already, if you’d just had the balls to—”
There was the sound of scuffling. Abigail grunted, and swore again. “Let me by, you—” More scuffling, then the splash of broken glass. From Conrad came a stream of vile oaths and vicious, specific threats, and I ran down toward the Squeeze. Since the wedding they had never to my knowledge laid hands on each other; if this was a first, it was happening in a dangerous place.
“I’m going to kill you,” he said, “you evil, ugly, useless, ugly bitch.”
Abigail laughed, a brand-new and terrible laugh. Had Medea ever laughed, she would have sounded just like Abigail. “You’re on, champ,” she announced, and I could hear her shuffling back through the Squeeze. “Come and get me,” she said. Her voice no longer reverberated. She was standing on the tiny ledge, at the dropoff.
Then I could see her. I had made it down to their level and was facing the northern wall of the Squeeze, the western half of which jutted out over nothing. Abigail stood on tiptoe, way out beyond my reach, leaning into the narrow passage and taunting him, singing to him. Come and get me, Ramrodder, go ahead, kill me, you can do it, I’m right here. Come to Ma-ma.
I couldn’t have stopped him. Unable even to open my mouth to scream I stood rooted and held my breath and waited to see his long arms emerge and propel my sister into space. Today, when I close my eyes, I can still see those arms, sweatered in threadbare gray wool, shoot out, his crabbed hands extended toward her throat, the image far more vivid and persuasive than actual memory. In drab memory I hesitate dully calculating the odds of my dashing into the passage and tackling him before he succeeds in killing her. The odds were bad, on top of which if I took my eyes off her I was sure she would die. I had once been a capable, rational woman.
Abigail glanced my way. “What are you doing here?” she asked, in an absurdly conversational tone, as though I had barged in on her in the bathroom. “Look, would you do me a favor? Captain Courageous is stuck in there. Would you help him out?”
“Help him what?” I had found my voice at last. “Help him kill you?”
Abigail smiled at me, in a superior way. “You always take everything so seriously. He’s not going to do anything. He never does. Just get him out of there. He’s such a fucking baby.”
Numbly I went down to the entrance to the Squeeze, and there he was. Not stuck, but slumped down near the entrance, his back against one wall, his head in his hands. The air reeked of bourbon, and there were glass shards all over the ground. Thank God for that. It gave me myself back. “Pick that up,” I said to him. “Pick up every single piece of glass.”
“I’ll cut myself,” he said.
“Little children come to this place,” I said. “Pick it up right this minute!”
And he did, every piece, and walked back to the park entrance with the broken glass cupped in his hands, and dumped it in a trash can, and he didn’t cut himself. Nor did he say another word. We drove home in silence, as the short day waned and the sky got darker still, until, within a mile of Watch Hill, I told them that I would be leaving for good in the morning. Abigail said she understood. Conrad said nothing. A single tiny snowflake settled on my windshield, melting immediately, and just before I pulled into the driveway, another settled in its place. I’d have to get an early start tomorrow. With snow, you never know.
Chapter Twenty-One
The Great Blizzard of 1978
Snow heavy at times tonight. Probable accumulations of 8 to 16 inches. Windy with drifting, Snow ending tomorrow. Low tonight in teens. High tomorrow in the 20s. Northeast winds 25 to 40 mph tonight and north winds 25 to 35 mph tomorrow.
I slept poorly Sunday night, partly out of guilt about my impending escape, but mostly because of those two tiny snowflakes on my windshield and the real possibility of coming awake to a storm and finding myself snowed in with George and Martha at Agincourt. I didn’t achieve real sleep until four in the morning, and when I woke up it was almost noon. Of course they’d let me sleep. And it had indeed begun to snow, in big fat flakes. But the road outside my windows was reasonably clear, and I saw no good reason to change my plans.
It’s worth noting that tens of thousands of Rhode Islanders took to the highways that day in the identical casual, can-do spirit. And in the intervening years those same people, when presented with the veriest dusting of snow, race to the nearest supermarket and strip its shelves of bread and milk. Since that day, nothing panics us, here in the Panic State, like snow.
Conrad stayed in bed. Abigail helped me carry my stuff to the car. She wouldn’t come with me, and I was through arguing with her. I told her to get the Plymouth fixed, or else she’d be h
ousebound. I promised to call her that night, from Frome. I started the car, and she leaned into the window and kissed me. “Tell Anna I love her,” she said, and straightened up, her face expressionless. And still I backed out of the driveway as she waved me off, and headed off for home, her kiss still moist on my cold cheek.
We never kissed, ever. As I drove north on the Westerly road the drying kiss puckered my skin like paper glue. After two miles I thought I could feel it still, and I didn’t raise my hand to rub it away. Abigail hadn’t meant to make me worry; she was manipulative with everyone else, but not with me. She was not, is not, the suicidal type. True, at the Lemon Squeeze she had appeared bent on her own destruction, but appearances had deceived me. She was right about Conrad. He was no danger to her, at least not at that moment. I put the mystery of that kiss out of my mind, and concentrated upon enjoying my freedom.
There were quite a few cars on Watch Hill Road that day, parading north at a sedate pace, and at first I had no trouble following the navy blue Lincoln in front of me. I have always loved to drive in this kind of snow. It’s not particularly slippery, and it puts a hush over the road, and the more thickly it closes in, the safer you feel, domed in white, as in a child’s merry paperweight. I listened to the Jupiter Symphony on ’GBH, then turned it off for the silence, because they were prattling on too much about the foolish weather.
By the time I got to the Airport Road I couldn’t see the outlines of the Lincoln anymore, just the red smudge of its lights, and the wind began to pick up. That there were still other cars on the road quickly became something I had to take on faith, because as far as I could see, there was me and that Lincoln, and I tried to recall if I had ever known anything as white as this day. We slowed to a belly-crawl. I had absolutely no idea where we were. After I had driven for an hour I checked the odometer: I had come seven miles.
Wherever that Lincoln was going, I was going too. It turned out that it was headed, not for Frome, which would have been way too much to hope for, but for Ashaway, at the outskirts of which we each came to a wheel-spinning stop. I tried rocking the car, but it was hopeless. After debating whether to take anything with me (no, I decided; if I have to, I can always come back), I emerged into the howling white, no boots on my sneakered feet, and made my way over to the Lincoln. An older couple emerged, and together, wordlessly, hunched forward at the waist, we descended into Ashaway.
We stopped at the first shelter we came to, an oblong concrete structure on the outskirts of town. We could see the outline of a sign on the roof, but couldn’t begin to read it. All that mattered, anyway, was that you could see lights inside, and it looked warm. So it was that at one P.M. on February 6, 1978, I came to Rocco’s Famous Sport & Trophy.
Rocco himself ushered us into a long room cluttered with duck decoys, waders, half-opened boxes of hunting boots, basketballs, pool cues, and eight other people, all of them clearly sheltering from the storm. Before the day was through six more straggled in. Rocco kept us all supplied with coffee and hot chocolate, and we gathered around a small black and white television set and listened to the day’s events unfold, there being nothing to watch except talking heads and archived films of old blizzards. The announcers were snowed in too, as were mobile cameras, spy-in-the-sky helicopters, police cruisers, ambulances, fire trucks, and, most significantly, snowplows.
By suppertime I was ready to face the prospect of spending the night in a motel, at which I was informed by the Lincoln couple that there were no motels in Ashaway. They themselves lived in Ashaway, but on the other side of town. Fifteen of us, plus Rocco, would have to bed down at the Sport & Trophy. Our host, a prince among men, unpacked sleeping bags and army cots and inflatable rafts, and while we lined up to use his phone he grabbed a Coleman lantern and set out for a nearby convenience store. We stood in the open door and watched the swirling white swallow up Rocco and his brave little light.
Anna answered the phone on the second ring. She had two high school friends with her, stranded on what was supposed to be an afternoon visit, and they’d built a fire in the fireplace, cooked and eaten dinner, and washed up. They were having a fabulous time. She was happy to hear from me, but only because she’d been worried, and I gave her the number at Rocco’s and promised to see her some time tomorrow.
Half an hour later, just when we were about to send out a rescue party, in blew Rocco, quilted in snow, bearing a plastic garbage bag full of plunder. “Sorry, folks,” he said, “somebody else must have had the same idea. All I got is snack crap and stuff.” There had been no one in the store, he told us, and the door was wide open, and there wasn’t a loaf of bread or a carton of milk in the place.
Rocco had brought us a case of Spam, two jars of yellow mustard, two boxes of cream-filled chocolate cupcakes, at least a hundred packages of peanut butter cheese crackers, and, sloshing in the bottom of the bag, a million packets of grape Kool-Aid with which to wash it all down. That night we dined like kings, the old kings, the ones who ate meat with their hands, and we regaled one another with tales of the strange lands from which we had journeyed, Hopkinton and Olneyville, Chepachet and Attleboro, and the singular quests which had brought us to this hospitable place. With the exception of the Lincoln couple, retirees returning from a stay with their daughter’s family in Stonington, we were all working people, on the road to deliver auto parts and office supplies and olive oil, or on our way home from early closings. There was a schoolteacher, a hairdresser, a dental hygienist, and an insurance salesman (who assured us, chuckling, as we registered alarm, that he was off duty for the evening). There were two hunters on their day off. Some of us, including me, never revealed their occupations, and none of us exchanged full names, but we were good company that night. And later, bedding down on a hardwood floor, nestled snugly between a civics teacher and somebody named Bev, I slept more profoundly than I had in weeks.
And awoke the next morning to snow, snow, and snow. Breakfast was not quite as jolly as dinner had been, although most of us were still in a positive mood. We spent the first half of the morning trying to open the front door so that the men could go out and scavenge. High winds had blown a drift of epic proportions against the entire storefront, and the rear door was also unmanageable. Mid-morning the men left, smartly attired by Rocco in the latest Eskimo gear. We didn’t see them again for more than two hours, the length of time it took them to locate the convenience store, which had effectively disappeared, and burrow into it. “You can all forget about your cars. You’re never going to find them again,” they announced upon their return, as they dumped on counter and floor every edible and semi-edible thing they had been able to find, including a frozen-solid block of saugies, five gallons of rainbow sherbet, a gross of spearmint gum packets, and a giant box of Bisquick.
We stared blankly at our comestible future, and then one of the women started laughing, triggering a tension-releasing group laugh, except that the woman who had started it kept going and seemed for a while unable to stop, and after she finally did a pall settled over us, and we went our separate ways to ponder our plight, which wasn’t easy in a single twelve-by-fifteen room. Rocco assured us all that we’d be okay, it couldn’t snow forever, and besides he had plenty of heating fuel, and if we were still here tomorrow (“If,” snorted two of the men) he’d break out his homemade jerky, of which he had an inexhaustible supply.
This triggered a run on the phone, as it occurred simultaneously to all of us to worry about the heating fuel status of our loved ones. It took me an hour to get through to Anna, because the phone lines were tied up statewide, but when I did she assured me that we’d had an oil delivery two days before, and she had plenty of stuff to eat. When I elaborated upon where I was, she laughed herself into hiccups. “Poor Dorcas,” she said, “no place to hide and not a book in sight.”
I asked her to call her mother, and then I hung up. Poor Dorcas. I didn’t like the sound of that, especially coming from my girl. And I really hadn’t needed reminding that there was noth
ing to read. For the rest of that dreary day I made a library out of Rocco’s Famous Sport & Trophy, and to this day I can remember the address, down to the very zip code, of the factory in Worcester where his trophies were made, and the banal cover designs on each of his catalogues, and all six recipes on the back of the Bisquick box. The others exchanged life stories, commiserated about local politics, cursed the ancestry of all snow-removal personnel, while I studied Rocco’s inventory list, read up on duck blind construction, and committed to memory “The Saga of Acme Quoits,” which, to my sorrow, was only a mimeographed page and a half long. Late in the afternoon I was overjoyed to discover a pornographic paperback hidden in the bathroom behind the toweling and soap supplies. It was titled Full Frontal Funhouse, an odd choice for text-only, and the plot wasn’t much, but just the heft of the book, the reassuring orderly march of words across the page, was enough to soothe me, and I only regretted having to read it in the bathroom.
So I was in decent spirits when the telephone rang shortly after supper (saugies off a hotplate: really delicious) and it was Anna, and she was worried about Abigail. “Mother sounds funny,” she said.
I hadn’t given Abigail an extended thought since the blizzard began. “In what way funny?”
“I don’t know. She says she’s okay but I don’t believe it. She kept telling me she loved me. She never does that.”
“Just please tell me exactly what she said.”
“I called her, and the phone rang and rang, and when she picked it up, or he did, there was this clunking sound like it was dropped on the floor, and then somebody hung up. I called right back and he answered, right away, and he thought it was you. He said, ‘Dorcas?’ And when I told him I wanted to speak to Mother he just dropped the phone, and after a while she was on the line. She started crying. She said she was a bad mother, because she hadn’t called to see how I was, and you know, she never does that. It took me a while to calm her down. Then she said everything was just fine. Which is bullshit. I’m sorry, Dorcas, but that’s what it is.”
Winner of the National Book Award: A Novel of Fame, Honor, and Really Bad Weather Page 25