by Rachel Simon
Alvina’s curtains have moth holes. The hems have frayed. She combs the loose threads to make them hang straight.
She wishes they’d had children. She wishes Arnel hadn’t put off adopting. She waits for her Social Security check in the mail.
When the ice storm comes that winter, it slicks the dirt out back like a white mirror. The world outside is crystal. Even loose garbage in the yard glistens. Before her head leaves the pillow, Alvina can tell by the flat silence that the expressway is closed.
At her back widow, shielding her eyes from the sun, Alvina sees Ronnie. The girl is crouching beside the fence, jabbing at the ice with a fork in one hand, holding an open egg carton with the other. Alvina throws on her sweaters, buttons up her coat, steps outside.
“Collecting ice now?”
Ronnie looks up. “Yeah. I’m seeing if ice dirt’s like regular dirt.”
“That can’t be fun.”
“It’s fun,” Ronnie says, breaking one section into several small chunks of ice. She picks up one with a brown center as if it’s a diamond, holds it up to the sky, grins. After a minute, she puts it in the egg carton.
“Highway’s closed,” Alvina says.
“I know.”
Alvina looks away, to the strip of road behind her house, where for years she has seen cars, baked silver by the sun, streaking by like schools of fish. Now it’s like the river’s been drained dry; all she can see is the bottom, and the fish have melted into a big sheet that stretches over the riverbed as far as she can see.
“I’m gonna take me a stroll down the highway,” Alvina says. “Never know when this’ll happen again.”
Ronnie looks up, her hands wrapped around the fork handle.
“You coming with me?” Alvina asks.
The girl glances back at her mother’s house. Through the plastic on the broken kitchen window drifts the low, deep chatter of white men on the television and her mother’s high voice weaving through theirs as she gossips on the phone. The quiet of the expressway makes Alvina feel as if she’s in the country again. Cars there were such strangers, years after Alvina moved north she kept confusing distant horns with the cries of tired babies. Ronnie’s visited the country only once that Alvina can think of. The girl’s never lived in a home where if no one’s talking she hears silence. Alvina says, “This like that school trip to the state park you liked so much? No people, no sounds?” Ronnie turns and faces the expressway and lowers the egg carton to the ground. “Yeah,” she says.
The little girl climbs over the fence, then holds open a small flap in the steel for Alvina to crawl through. On the other side, they step carefully around naked hedges, and step out onto the shoulder.
The light along the highway is blinding, as though all the spotlights in the world were turned on them. Alvina squints, and tears slip away from her eyes. Ronnie runs on ahead. In this light, on this ice, the little girl looks blacker than the blackest marble. She skips and slides along the road.
Alvina watches and follows behind and thinks to herself: she looks like the shadow of a flame.
I’ll always be here to catch her if she falls.
Before the projects, before the first gray hair. Long, long ago. Alvina is new to the city.
Clear nights on the roof, Alvina can see so many stars she feels as if someone spilled a box of sugar across the sky. She and Arnel live right underneath, in a one-room attic apartment. Its ceiling hangs low; at night it seems to wrap around their bed. On the roof they found a pair of wooden chairs. Alvina scrubbed the soot off, set them up for a good view. Every night she and Arnel have free they leave that room, sit under the stars and look out to the city.
Arnel plays his banjo, the round box an oat can, the neck a broom handle. He picks at the strings, plink, plunk, as he serenades the city. Alvina sits beside him, reading library books or just gazing. The city spreads before them like a blanket of lights; sometimes she feels she could stretch out her arm and grab one, hold it as it glows in her smooth and unlined hands.
Arnel got into a good job here, loading war weapons in a factory. It’s a bustling place; he comes home with his feet sore, in need of rubbing. For Alvina, it’s knees and hands that hurt. Her job is in an elegant theater, where she polishes marble and terrazzo floors at night after a ballet. She shows up early sometimes, peers through an open door in the balcony, watches. The dancers are lithe and white and seem to fly. Alvina tries to remember how they move.
Now, on the roof, she practices. Spinning, whirling, up on her toes. Arnel strums a tune and she follows. She tosses her arms this way and that, leaps with legs parted wide. Give her one of the dancers’ white ruffled costumes and who could tell the difference.
Sometimes at work, while Alvina’s wire brush is arching across the floor in her hand, she hears the ballerinas talking as they pad in twos and threes from the dressing room to the street. They complain their feet hurt, their husbands won’t dance — nothing that matters to Alvina. Nothing, that is, until the day she hears them boast about how long each has gone since she bled. Six months, says one. Thirteen, brags another. They one-up each other, making Alvina gasp, because if she were chiming in she’d lose to them all, a simple one month being the longest Alvina’s ever had to wait.
Arnel and Alvina have been trying for a baby. Some folks back home had secrets, and Alvina wrote them to get ideas. “Lie with him only when the moon’s full,” Alvina’s aunt scrawled. “Rabbit bones in the bed,” Mink the Albino had his brother write. Arnel and Alvina try it all, each idea, but every four weeks her body sends the message that no baby’s growing, and even the most guaranteed of tricks can’t seem to make that fact change.
Mist lets Alvina’s hair untwist itself from her ribbon and sprout. She pats it down as she rides the bus home. Used to be, she walked, but when Arnel took note of her three gray hairs last year, he said, “A young lady like you’s got no business getting gray,” and told her she ought to start riding the bus.
Tonight, the air is thick enough to see; the sky looks close, a big gray hat resting on top of the street. Alvina squints through the mist as she steps off the bus. Inside the front door stands Arnel, peering up like he’s reading flaking paint on the wall. She can see through the glass he’s whistling.
He opens the door wearing that smile he has, half a halo swung low. “Some buddies from work’re upstairs,” he says. The war over, he’s in a store now, asking, Floor, please? in an elevator paneled with rosewood, mirrors, and the perfumes of shopping women. “They came to see our new radio.”
Radio’s almost all they own, except for the bed and kitchenware. It’s squat as a fat woman, sits in their room at the foot of the bed. Bathroom’s smaller than the radio, probably.
Tunes from their place toot down the stairs. Arnel’s banging at doors on the way, laughing. Neighbors open up, poke faces into the stairwell. “Party at our place, friends!” Arnel says, rapping on the next door. Some folks close back up, but most step out and take hold of the bannister.
Upstairs, guests pile onto the mattress, crowd along the walls, everyone’s singing along. Alvina has some pie she sets out, and one of the men brought wine. Arnel, pouring some in a glass for Alvina, leans forward and whispers, “My cousin says he’ll send his boy to come live with us, if we tell him yes. When he starts school. Maybe we’ll have us a child after all.”
Just then the Duke comes on the radio and Arnel slides his arm around Alvina’s waist, draws her into the doorway, and they dance. So many people so close heat up the air, and in the dark bedroom window lit from the inside Alvina sees her face, glowing like black fire. Arnel holds his arm high, and Alvina underneath it twirls. She spots like a ballerina, looking at Arnel, whipping her head around quick, looking at Arnel again. All kinds of faces are in the room: old, adult, young. Faster and faster she goes until the ages blur together; until all the faces streaking past come to seem like one.
Nighttime, and rain slaps against the side of the theater. It is quiet, except for the rat-a-
tat-tat of the water. Alvina packs away her brush and bucket for the night and coats her hands with Vaseline. Years of soap water have made her knuckles thick and cracked; sometimes the pink side of her fingers gives out and splits wide open. Tonight she makes her way along the upstairs corridor to the stairway. The dancers have already left; there is nothing to see but the hallway and the fire escape outside. She shuffles past the windows, not taking note, and then something out the glass stops her, turns her around to look.
A teenage girl, maybe thirty years younger than Alvina, is sitting on the metal landing. She is hugging her legs in close, resting her arms on her knees, and burying her face in the sloped lap. The girl’s hair melts down her dark cheeks in the rain, and her eyes are shut. Her dress clings to her; every curve shows.
Alvina stands watching the girl in the rain. Then she pushes up the window. The clatter of water on the metal staircase echoes in the theater corridor. “What’re you doing?”
The girl turns her head without lifting it and glances at the window, her face so blank it’s as if the rain had washed her away. Alvina knows she does not work here; she must have climbed up from the ground. The girl looks back down to her bent knees.
“Didn’t you hear me?”
“Go away.” The girl talks into her legs.
“You can’t keep sitting there getting wet,” Alvina says, and this time the girl doesn’t even look up.
Alvina rests on one knee on the windowsill and tests the rain. It is so cold that she thinks it’ll soon switch to hail. But what’s she going to do — leave that girl out there? Alvina pulls herself outside. The rain thumps onto her like a jazz pianist’s hands.
She shoves the window closed, then sits against the railing. The girl, head down this whole time, peeks out an eye. “What’re you doing here, lady?”
The water has beaten the air out of Alvina’s dress and now the cloth is slicked on like skin. “I figure anybody sitting out in the rain must be needing some company.”
The girl picks her head up, and she and Alvina face each other. Alvina can see over the girl’s shoulder. A bus passes by. Women cloaked in furs huddle beneath awnings. Raindrops fall through the dark and in the light from the theater become speckles of white, then strike the street and are swallowed back into black.
“I’ve got a problem,” the girl says finally. It’s been at least ten minutes that they’ve been facing each other. She drops her hands to her stomach and curls her fingers over the roundness. “I don’t want no baby.”
Alvina sees this every week with the girls on her block. “Can’t expect it’ll go away,” Alvina says. “Don’t you have a mother or a grandma you can look to for help?”
“No.”
“Well, you got to find somebody to care for it.”
The girl, a frown set deeper than her age should allow, sighs heavily and says, “You want it?”
For a wild flash Alvina thinks of putting the question to Arnel, but she knows he’ll say they can’t take on kids, same as he says when Alvina brings up the neighborhood girls; the cot’s already earmarked. “My husband and I, we’re waiting to adopt a boy from home.”
“A little baby?”
“No, he must be fourteen, fifteen by now. His father’s had to keep him around for family help, but he should be coming soon.”
The girl smirks and shakes her head. “You think they’ll send him off at that age? Ha.”
Alvina used to ask Arnel this very question, but with his cough getting worse lately, she’s let off. What would be the use? Every year they said they’d send the boy, and every year, because of money problems or someone getting sick, they didn’t. Still, Alvina keeps hoping. “Well,” she says, “let’s put our heads together. Maybe I can help you come up with a person who’d want it.”
“I can’t think of a single soul,” the girl says.
Alvina can imagine all kinds of people who might help. Sisters, aunts, friends. Could even be a neighbor the girl isn’t remembering right now. Alvina will come up with an answer. Alvina will stay here until she and the girl can figure it out. “I bet there is.”
“What’s it to you anyway?” the girl says, looking at the theater window, then back at Alvina. “Why do you care?”
Alvina makes fists of her rough hands and shoves them against the seams of her pockets. The rain is so heavy, so cold, it pounds to the inside of her bones.
“Because,” she says.
Winter, seventy years before the projects. Alvina in a backyard of grass. Grass covered with ice.
Alvina is on the back porch of her first house, the real house in the country, where the other side of walls is the outside; where streets serve mostly as beds for sleepy dogs. She ties her shoes, her long black hair hanging in braids. She is small and soft, her skin as smooth as the tide sand on a beach. After she buttons her coat all the way to the top, Alvina climbs down the long wooden stairway, leaving her mother upstairs beside the changing table, powder in one hand, her brother’s tiny feet in the other, woman and baby giggling with each other.
Outside — where are the others? Mary, Paula, Jamie? Not a single foot has hollowed a print in the ice. Not a single voice cuts through the wooo of the wind. Mothers hold all the children indoors, let them touch no more than the cold glass of the windows. “It’s too icy out there, you best not go for you fall and crack your head open.”
But what they are missing! The world is Alvina’s. She skates across the iced lawn, gliding over blades of grass, frozen insects, sleeping worms. Arms out, she keeps her balance. When she slows down, she runs a few yards, then stops, and lets the ghost of her running feet carry her along. This way and that. Back and forth across the lawn until it seems she’s worn it all down.
Then she steps heavily, digging her feet into the ice near her neighbor’s picket fence. The ice here is thin. Her footsteps leave patterns like spiderwebs.
She finds the hole in the fence, crawls through. This is where Miss Lela Jackson lives. The richest black lady you’ll ever know. Lives right next door on enough land for three families, with a backyard that slopes down so far, it could be a sledding hill. Somehow she got it all from a white man. Gray hair sticks out from her head like a fistful of snakes. She screams if you step on her lawn. She bumps into folks she doesn’t like when they’re carrying big packages, and laughs when the apples scatter and the eggs break.
Always, always, Miss Lela hangs laundry outside. She seems to live for laundry. From Alvina’s house you can see Miss Lela’s kitchen, where that thick little body steams over the washboard, that chubby little hand wipes a trickle of sweat off her forehead. Then — the squeal of the clothesline as she reels it in, the click-click of clothespins as she hangs dresses, blouses, stockings, on the rope. The rope now covered with ice. She’s left everything up since yesterday. Her sheets have turned into walls.
Alvina steps onto Miss Lela’s lawn. Fresh ice. As clean and untouched as the newly polished floor at the house Alvina’s mother cleans. Alvina looks up to the back of the house. No lights. No head in the window.
And so, onto the hill. Swoop like a bird. Circle round the clothes, they hang stiff and low. She glides around some trousers, turns, then swings back around a nightgown, then back again. Down the hill, weaving in and out, around and around. She’s a real ice skater. She’s like the high school girls on the pond. Spinning, sliding, laughing, in the pure, clean air.
But the bottom of the hill comes too fast. Her toes lift up, her heels dig in — then flip, over and under. She lands on her face.
All the world goes still. It practically buzzes with silence. She turns over, opens her eyes — and everything has turned white.
Up — the sky is white.
Down — her body is white.
Across the lawn — the way to her house, the way up the hill — all white. Solid as rock.
She picks herself up, puts out her arms in front of her. If I go way up, I’ll be on that hill. On that hill I can find the fence. Then the hole. Then I’ll b
e right home with my mama.
But the sharp edge of an iced sheet almost splits her in two. She moves to the side, tries to walk, one foot in front of the other. Steps carefully, heavily — and slam! hits another sheet broadside. Her feet just won’t move straight.
She sits down and cries. A breeze picks up and blows away her hat. Her eyes are so cold.
Suddenly an arm tugs at her. “Quit your howling,” Miss Lela says. “What’re you doing here?”
“I fell and now I can’t see!” Alvina looks in the direction of Miss Lela. All that’s there is white.
“What’cha mean, you can’t see? Your eyes they look fine.”
“They ain’t fine. Would I be walking into sheets if they was?”
Miss Lela says nothing. Alvina wonders if she’ll get punished, if Miss Lela will pin her on the clothesline so she’ll freeze like a gingerbread girl. No one ever comes in this yard. Who would know, till she thawed in the spring?
Then Alvina feels the palm of a glove take her mittened hand. “This way. This way. Up here, up, up. Careful. This way. One foot after another — watch your stepping.”
That foot up, this one higher — yes, stairs. Inside. Mothballs and linseed oil and bacon and cider. “Lie down here.”
Something scratchy and warm on her face.
“Shoot, girl, you know what you got wrong? You got ice in your eyes.”
Miss Lela lifts the towel from Alvina’s eyes a little bit at a time, like it’s a kettle lid and she wants to see if the water’s boiling. Slowly, the white begins to melt at the edges. She takes the towel away. Alvina tries to see.
Ceiling beams.
Oil paintings.
Lace curtains.
The ice swims around, giving Alvina a glimpse of this, a glance at that. Miss Lela’s face appears, then falls behind the ice. It’s like there’s a moving wall in Alvina’s eyes.
Finally it breaks apart. The tiny crystals make the world look as though it is full of white holes, like the world is something that comes only in pieces.