St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

by Karen Russell

  On the other side of the Palace, Lady Yeti was riding the pink Zamboni. She puttered around the rink, one furry hand on the steering wheel. It could have been a Sunday afternoon on an alien planet, and Lady Yeti was out mowing the lawn.

  Lady Yeti’s real name was Reba. She worked as the DJ, and the Modulator of the Snows. She had wide, hairy hips and maternal bags under her eyes. I never saw her without her Yeti suit. She was abominable in the best way, a bipedal gorilla with a moon-white pelt. We all loved her. Unlike many employees at the Palace—Gherkin with his split lip, the Ice Witch, my balding pops—Lady Yeti was spectacularly ugly. She was sort of lazy. She got winded from eating. “HI, REGGIE,” she’d roar in my ear, breathing heavy and covered in nacho crumbs. She was the most generous of us; her very body was warm and generous. Kids clambered all over her and hid in the baggy folds of her costume. Spit and candy matted her fur. We liked her much better than the Ice Witch.

  The Ice Witch was the daytime supervisor at the Palace of Artificial Snows. Lady Yeti worked nights. We’d arrived right at the transition.

  There were rumors that the Ice Witch and Lady Yeti were sisters, or that they were actually the same woman. And it was true that you never saw one with the other. But in every bodily respect, the Ice Witch and Lady Yeti were opposites. The Ice Witch was a skeletal beauty. Cold, quartz eyes, an anemic complexion. Once I caught her licking salt from the Big Soft Pretzel machine. She wore blue earmuffs and pearl-seamed gloves. She chain-smoked Sir Puffsters in the parking lot. The Ice Witch could work a sequined hypnosis on the male skaters, sure. But babies and primates don’t disguise their terror. Infants howled. The alpha orangutans lobbed bricks of ice at her; the orange runts cowered; and the medium-sized apes mostly ate their own feces and sulked.

  Lady Yeti’s voice growled over the loudspeaker. “Now presenting…the World Famous…Apes on Ice!”

  All at once, fourteen orangutans slid down chrome chutes into heaps of artificial snow. Poof! Poof! Lady Yeti dusted the grainy powder off of them and swung them around the rink. The two alphas, Cornelius and Tang, held on to Lady Yeti’s gloved hands, and the lesser apes knit their skinny gray fingers together, forming a staggered V of monkeys. In a peculiar inversion, the apes wore human costumes: tailored boleros, gold helmets, these special Velcro skates. They must’ve done this act a hundred times, and they still looked terrified.

  From the arena seats, if you squinted, you could pretend that the orangutans were skating of their own volition. But Badger and I had a privileged vantage point, low to the ground. We could see Lady Yeti’s tugs on the sequined leashes. We could hear her huffing and cursing:

  “Goddamn it, Cornelius, you milquetoast bum! A little help? Pick it up, Tang!”

  When I was a kid, I used to get weirdly aroused imagining this, Lady Yeti’s face beneath her mask, her cheeks turning rosy from the strain. She spun the apes in sad pirouettes beneath the colored lights. A neon disco ball freckled their bodies. Their helmets kept slipping over their eyes. The roving spotlight turned the apes weird and beautiful colors, and even Badger crept closer to watch. Pink light danced across their white fur, their golden fur, burgundy, blue, brown.

  You know, on the eve of our first Blizzard, we weren’t even friends yet, me and Badger? Which seems impossible to me now. But I could feel us becoming friends, our friendship freezing and solidifying with each hidden minute that we spent together beneath the dark booth. Our legs were tangled. Our round faces parted the red fringe.

  “Closing time!”

  After the Apes on Ice! Show and the Senior Hockey Hour, the Ice Witch banished everybody from the ice. Usually, this was the time of day when I would unlace my skates and trudge back to the bus with the other kids. But tonight Badger and I watched as the seniors headed off the ice, winking and gossiping, to change out of their uniforms. Most of them, we knew, would be staying for the Blizzard.

  The blinds came down. The wind piped up. Lady Yeti was already ensconced in the DJ booth, assembling her records. Peabo Bryson, Chaka Khan. We watched her flip a switch. The Indoor Weather Manufacturer lit up, an industrial palette of yellows and grays. Unseen instruments began to rumble. The temperature ticked down by degrees. My stomach roiled, and I got the vertiginous suspicion that we were descending down, down, down. Frost blurred the windows.

  Badger shifted onto his knees. “Did you hear that? They’re coming!”

  Adult laughter echoed through the Palace. Footsteps were headed towards us, toward the skate rental counter. I stifled a gasp. These were shoes that we knew: Herb’s galoshes, Mayor Horacio’s suede boots, Sister John’s square-toed oxfords, Chief Bigtree’s gator leather. Half the staff of our school was here: Cafeteria Midge, Principal Yglesias, Mr. Swanson. When I spotted the cheap, tasseled loafers that I knew belonged to Badger’s father, I looked over at Badger. His breath sounded funny. He looked like he was trying not to sneeze.

  The adults knelt down and stepped out of their familiar shoes. They grunted into their ski socks, their anonymous skate rentals. Nobody said a word.

  “Psst! Badger!” I asked stupidly. “That your father?”

  Badger shoved crumbs of popcorn into his mouth and didn’t answer. He was staring straight ahead. His father was bending down on one knee pad in front of us, doing up his laces.

  “When I found out he was coming here, I tried hiding his skates.” Bits of kernel gleamed between Badger’s teeth. “I took his gear and shit to the pawn shop.”

  “And then what happened?”

  Quivering fingers, inches from our noses. Tying double, triple-knots.

  “It didn’t matter. He comes anyways. Rentals are three dollars.”

  “How did you find out that your pops was coming here?”

  Badger didn’t answer. Lady Yeti had spotted us. She was skating over. Those legs! Lady Yeti looked like she could kill a man with her woolly quadriceps. Now she had seen us, there was nothing to be done. She’d have to extradite us to the Ice Witch. We curled in our spines and tailbones, paralyzed, and prayed for mercy.

  Lady Yeti got down on her knees with us. She blinked out at us from inside her shaggy costume.

  “Huh!” she chuckled. “Shouldn’t be here!” Her tiny eyes looked sad inside her mask. She reached into a secret pocket and emptied out its contents: mostly fur, and peppermints with fur stuck to them. “For when you get hungry, huh! Stay put.” She skated away.

  Badger’s father was one of the first men on the ice. He shoved away from the railing, his arms wheeling in the rising wind. His face made me want to like him more than I did. He had black, slicked-back hair and startled eyes. Poor form for a skater, I thought: hunched and eager. A funny buckle at the knees. Something about the way he was moving across the ice made me feel a little sick inside.

  Badger’s father was skating towards a stranger. A stranger to us, anyways. She had on a figure skater outfit—diaphanous skirts, ruby spangles, purple tights. It was the show-stopping garb of a petite Olympian. She looked to be about forty.

  “Huh,” I said. “She somebody you, uh, you know?”

  Badger’s eyes went small and mean. He crushed a soda can in his fist.

  “This is all your fault, Reg. Right now if it weren’t for you, he’d be home.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Badger pounded and pounded. The can was horseshoe-flat.

  “Wouldn’t even be a Blizzard if your pops didn’t work maintenance, and your pops wouldn’t need to work maintenance if you didn’t exist.”

  Often it was hard to argue with Badger.

  I tried anyhow: “Uh-uh. Don’t you put this on us. My pops doesn’t have anything to do with the Blizzard. He just unstuffs the pipes.” This was true. Pops rarely even needed his tool box. Mostly he just pulled scarves out of the fans. “Somebody else would maintain the Blizzard if he didn’t. It’s a popular event.”

  Badger wasn’t listening to me. His eyes were glued to the ice.

  “I wondercould you burn down an ice arena? Or would
you have to, like, explode it?”

  “Explode it, I guess? But, um, you know, you probably shouldn’t do either.”

  Badger was staring from his father to the strange woman and back again. We watched her stoop and pretend to smooth her seamless tights. Badger’s father turned a teenage shade of red. He pulled the woman closer.

  “But I wondercould you do it?”

  Badger had invented a new word, wondercould, a lexical bridge to all sorts of ugliness. Wondercould came out in one exhalation. It didn’t leave either of us much room to reflect. Even now, Badger was stroking the red tip of a match.

  “Badger…?”

  Now Badger’s father and the woman were skating together. She was a good skater, I guess, but I thought Badger’s mother had a more beautiful face. She circumscribed his hurried, hungry slide forward with a lithe figure eight. Her lips were red and parted. Her skirts swirled to a stop.

  The match had burned down to Badger’s fingers. I touched a flake of snow to the stick.

  “Badger?”

  “Shhh!” Badger said. “It’s starting.”

  The first snowflake of the Blizzard fell at 7:03. Isolated snowflakes came piping out of the vents, shy, single flakes, and then Lady Yeti flipped some invisible lever. The snow got faster. It got colder and thicker, and we felt a raw tingle in the air.

  She turned the knob up to “wintry mix.” Phil Collins crooned his mellow sorrow out of the loudspeakers. Snow blasted our faces. Factory snow. It fell in sheets, these uniform hexagonal crystals. Less unique, I guess, but more reliable than nature. You could taste the hard, mica falseness on your tongue.

  At this point, everyone had laced into their skates. Most of the adults were spinning in excitable circles, orbiting one another, sliding forward, colliding, collapsing—then skating quickly back to the snow fans, to hide beneath the starry blasts of snow. From our spot on the ground, we could see their faces. Mayor Horacio kept falling backwards and cursing. Midge did accidental splits. Suddenly ice-skating seemed like the most ludicrous of all human endeavors. What a stupid innovation! Skate blades. Indoor lakes. It had a perverse, fairy-tale logic, I thought, tying knives to your feet and carving out over frozen water.

  The Blizzard got going, the adults picked up speed. All that fake snow was disorienting, and we could only pick out about one face in twenty—Badger’s father, then Annie, then old Ned—their features blurred and fleeting, like faces from a dream. Scrawled-on eyes, a black declivity where their mouths should be. Badger’s father was skating with his head thrown back, laughing, letting the ice carry him forward. The music changed to Men Without Hats, and the adults went slamming into one another with a new violence. When it got to be too much, they skated for the “safety snow,” the dry, banked heaps along the outer edges of the rink. From what Gherkin had told me, I knew that this stuff was neither snow nor safe. It was a cold chemical foam trucked in from a plant in Scranton, glowing an unreal, satiny blue. Everybody seemed eager to collapse into it, to tumble into one another. I watched women roll around in it until their bodies became anonymous. Sister John dove headlong into the safety bank and emerged looking like a shrunken yeti, disguised and dripping with snow.

  Lady Yeti presided over it all from the raised dais of the DJ booth. Every few songs, a man would skate over to the DJ booth to “make a request.” He would slide Lady Yeti an embarrassing bribe: $5 in quarters, lotto tickets, raspberry cake gooed into napkins. She always accepted. Then the entire rink got that much wilder, that much whiter with snow. At first this confused me: this was what they were paying for? And then I got it. I saw it. What these men were purchasing was blindness: a snow cloak of invisibility. They could grab at the passing women without penalty, taunting them, tugging at their skirts. What the women wanted was less clear to me. To be grabbed at, I guess, without judgment.

  Mayor Horacio, in a holey, slush-crusted orange leotard, skated over to the DJ booth. He started complaining to Lady Yeti. He had to crane his neck to look up at her, black hair tufting over the sagging elastic. His Adam’s apple looked bulbous and indecent. “Do you see that clear patch over there? Yeah? Of course you do. Because there is no snow there. Because somebody is too busy eating nacho cheese to do her goddamn job….”

  This was true. The part of the rink that he pointed to looked weirdly unaffected by the Blizzard. Snow dripped down the walls, melting to a new and worrisome clarity. A short, chubby woman was standing there in full view, exposed in the pitiless winter light. She was trying to fan the meager flurries around her. When she caught Horacio looking, she sucked in her belly. Badger and I recognized her: Midge, who ladled cold noodles onto our plates five days a week. She looked pink and nervous. Carroty curls were pasted to her face. Someone—Badger’s father? Mayor Horacio?—had clawed runs into Midge’s tights. She waggled a wet, uncertain mitten in his direction.

  Horacio groaned. “Jesus, would you hurry?” He shoved damp singles at Lady Yeti. “Would you get me some big flurries over there, stat?”

  “Hold on!” Lady Yeti growled. Her control panel fizzed and sparked. “Problems. Let me give Maintenance a buzz.”

  Uh-oh. I’d been on the receiving end of the emergency calls from the Palace. The “Pops, it’s for you” end. Pops belting up, stumbling out to fix the midnight world.

  “Badger? Hey, Badger? We gotta go.”

  But Lady Yeti wasn’t dialing my father. Instead, she pounded her hairy fist on the control panel. “There we go! Never mind!”

  She cranked the wind up to a 6/7 on the Beaufort scale, just shy of gale force. She turned up the precipitation. And then a white curtain swirled around Horacio and Midge, blotting them out. I breathed a sigh of relief.

  “That was close, huh? I thought she was going to call in my pops.”

  Badger looked at me dully. “Oh. Where does he think you are right now?”

  “Your house. What about you? What did you tell your father?”

  Badger snorted. “I’m supposed to be at my house too. Babysitting Mom.”

  “Oh.” If you’re here, then who’s watching her? But I didn’t want to know the answer.

  Badger’s mother was very, very sick. It looked like she caught a bad dream from somebody. She slumped in a motorized chair, heavy with sleep. If you saw her from a distance, she looked like an extension of the machine, a fleshy covering for the machine. Nobody on the island knew the specifics of her disease, but we could see its sly effects. It turned you into some nightmare centaur, a robot in a woman-blanket. Coughs, whirs, beeps, moans, but no movement. So—not that I condoned what Badger’s father was doing during the Blizzard, but I could see why he’d pay to go snow-blind for a while.

  I said as much, in my mincing way, to Badger.

  “You shut up now, Reggie. Shut up. I’ll bet your dad comes here too and what’s his excuse? There is no excuse. I wondercould you go to hell, Reggie?”

  He sent popcorn jumping up from the damp carpet with his fist.

  “Look!” Badger dragged me out from under the table. “It’s her!”

  Lady Yeti was helping a woman off the rink. It looked like she had taken a nasty spill into a snow fan. Head to toe, she was dripping with it.

  “…and he hurt me, he hurt me bad,” the woman was sobbing into Lady Yeti’s fur. “He pushed me and he just let me fall….”

  “You just told me that story, ma’am.” Lady Yeti was careful to modulate her own booming alpine volume. “Remember? You just got done telling me that very same story.”

  “Really?” The woman touched the hollow of her throat and shivered a little. “That same story?”

  “Word for word.”

  A look came over the woman’s face then, a confused and terrible look. As if she had just stumbled on a set of her own footprints in the snow, and realized that she was lost.

  “Well! It’s a good story, anyways! Let’s get ya cleaned up, huh!” Lady Yeti beat the wet flakes out of the woman’s hair. “You better sit this one out….”

  We
followed the snow-drunk woman into the bathroom.

  They even had flurries going in the bathroom, a phony violet-blue, piped in through the high vents. Somebody—my pops?—had rigged up the hand dryers to spew translucence. It must have been a nightmare for Gherkin to clean up. Frost limned the mirrors. The sinks were bowls of freezing slush. All the toilet paper was damp. We could see our outlines in the glass, but not much else. The woman’s face materialized behind us, her eyes shiny and rimmed with red.

  “You,” Badger sputtered. “You.” You could tell he hadn’t really planned this far ahead.

  The woman fell forward and pressed her nose against the mirror. She gave us a scary, sidelong smile. The flurries blew around the room like tiny moths.

  “Should you boys be in here? This is the ladies’ room….”

  “Y-y-you.” His teeth were chattering. “You! You’re not my mother. You’re nobody….”

  The woman wouldn’t even turn to face us. She was unsteady on the blunt edge of her skates, and allowed herself to topple backwards. Badger held out an unwilling arm to support her.

  “Why were you skating with my father?”

  The woman giggled. She yanked at her soaking tights.

  “Which one’s your father?

  Badger shoved her away from us, hard. She fell backwards into one of the freezing sinks, her head thunking against the mirror. Chunks of snow bobbed around her like little icebergs.

  “You’re nobody! You’re just some able-bodied bitch….”

  He yanked me towards the door. Behind us, we could hear the woman shouting for Lady Yeti. I hoped that she hadn’t gotten a good look at our faces. Now we had our own reason to flee the bright lights.