The Snowman's Children

by Glen Hirshberg

  I don’t remember mulling over my plan—the whole thing was pretty well concocted by then—but I must have been concentrating on it, because I walked right past Barbara Fox, who was standing on her lawn. When I realized she was there, I whirled around. She was smiling, arms open. I ran for them.

  “Mattie, watch my—” she said, but I dove into her, and she crumpled into her astonishing tan like a paper bag. “It’s all right,” she sighed, sitting down hard, flinching. “It’s all right, honey.” She was holding her left knee. Her black hair, longer than I’d ever seen it, fanned over her face.

  “Get down here,” she said.

  I knelt and she hugged me, and I felt her khaki shirt rustling.

  “Feel this,” she said, and put my hand on her kneecap. It rolled beneath my fingers like an air-hockey puck. “Dislocated.”

  “How?”

  “Fell off a ladder—that was leaning against a hut.”

  I couldn’t believe she was back. Eighteen months was such an incredibly long time to me. I’d half believed I’d never see her again.

  She looked at me so long it felt like touching, and I fell back a little, afraid. Her face reflected light-and-leaf patterns like shade from some phantom jungle tree.

  “You really do remember me, don’t you?” she said.

  “Don’t be a dork,” I said casually, as if I hadn’t invented a substitute for sheep-counting that centered on her for all the nights I couldn’t sleep. I would lie in my bed and imagine twenty-two-year-old Barbara Fox and me cradled inside a giant cocoon, hidden together forever.

  She’d been in West Africa, Mali mostly, teaching and town-building with the Peace Corps, though my mother told my father it was all just an excuse to get far away from her parents.

  She leaned back on her elbows in the grass and stretched her legs over mine. For several minutes, I sat there watching the knob of her ankle. Then I put my index finger on her kneecap again and felt the blood beating beneath it. I was going to be late for Red-Gray Day and my grand plan. I couldn’t have cared less.

  “You wouldn’t believe the grass in Africa,” she said, instead of Mattie-move-your-hand.

  Closing my eyes, I concentrated all my energy in my fingertip, until it seemed as if I could feel the grass brushing against her.

  “After the rains, Mattie. God, you wouldn’t believe the rains. Get your finger off me, you little lech.”

  Blushing, I jerked back my hand.

  “When are your parents going out next?”

  Something began to fizz in my head until I realized she meant baby-sitting, and then I blushed again and shook my head.

  “I don’t need a baby-sitter anymore. I haven’t for years.”

  “Not even me?”

  “We just wanted to give you something to do on Saturday nights.”

  Barbara jabbed her fingers into the ticklish spot between my ribs and I collapsed onto the lawn. I tried rolling away, but she’d clamped her good leg over my chest and I couldn’t get up or even breathe. She was about to let me go, I think, when I felt her stiffen, then push herself to a standing position, favoring her trick knee.

  At the screen door, her father had appeared in his undershirt. He looked even hairier, now that his hair had gone all the way white all over his body. It puffed out of his shirt and hooded his red-rimmed eyes. He looked like a chicken.

  “Well,” he said, and I remembered when he came back from Vietnam. He’d been a reporter, not a soldier. Even so, my father sat me down and told me he didn’t like me going over there. “Frankly, son,” he’d said, “Phil Fox makes us nervous. He’s not the same man. He needs real help.” Mrs. Fox had still lived there then, and Barbara spent a number of her college weekends at home with them and babysitting me.

  “Morning, Mr. Fox,” I said, and stood up.

  “Go to school, Mattie,” Barbara said, her eyes locked on her father, and she moved toward the house without a wave or a backward glance.

  I lifted the wheelbarrow and trundled off past the trees in the suffocating sunlight. The thought that if I wanted, I could stop at the Fox place on the way home, knock on the door, and find Barbara there made me smile.

  As soon as I turned onto Cider Lake Road, I saw Theresa a half block ahead. I pushed the wheelbarrow off the sidewalk onto the gravel shoulder so the pebbles clamored around it. Finally, I made enough racket that she stopped and turned around. Her flower-print skirt swirled around her ankles. She stood and waited, lips moving. Such an incredibly strange girl.

  “Hey,” I said. “You’re here.”

  “No kidding,” said Theresa, as she fell in beside me. She didn’t ask about the wheelbarrow. She looked at it, though.

  “You’re actually coming.”

  “He actually let me.”

  This was new information. I’d always thought Theresa chose to get sick on Red-Gray Day because she couldn’t win anything.

  “See that?” said Theresa, pointing at the living room window of the gray house in front of us. In the lower right-hand corner was a little hand, outlined in red tape.

  “What is it?”

  “If we’re attacked, we’re supposed to run for the nearest hand.”

  “Attacked by what?”

  She didn’t answer for a while. She walked, and I walked beside her, until she said, “Anything.”

  “Rabies?” I said, and she grinned.

  “Radioactive ooze.”

  “Jamie Kerflack.”

  “Bessie Romano,” she said, and both of us tooted mock clarinets in the air. A few months before, Bessie had decided she didn’t like being fifth-chair clarinet in the band. So, one by one, she picked up all four chairs ahead of her, and all four people in them, and flipped them over the flutes into the percussion section.

  “Do you think you have friends at school?” I asked.

  She just walked, with her eyes forward. The path to school curled through the trees—like a skip rope, with all the tree trunks beside it poised for the leap—but when we reached it, Theresa went the other way, around the bend in the road that led to the lake.

  Without a word, I followed. If we’d been luckier, no one would have seen us. We’d have spent the morning in the mud beside the storm-stripped pier, committing a double hooky so unlikely that even Dr. Daughrety probably would have laughed. Sometimes, I really think, if no one had seen us, we would have waded all day in that man-made lake, and by the time we got home it would have been plain old summer, which would have given way to an ordinary fall, and none of the rest of it would have happened.

  I left the wheelbarrow and my shoes at the top of the knoll, and we stumbled together down the grassy berm through clouds of dragonflies that rose up ticking. Theresa shed her sandals at the water’s edge and hiked up her skirt. Her skin looked sketch-paper white, as if she’d never been outside before. She stepped without cringing into the aluminum-colored lake, which closed around her ankles and locked her in place.

  “My grandmother’s here,” she said, as I eased into the muck beside her, and for one horrible second I thought she meant in the water. I wasn’t afraid of Cider Lake, not the way I was in winter when I looked into the ice. But I never liked the feel of the bottom, how it sucked at you.

  Theresa had her hand on the pier, which seemed to have less metal left in it than the lake, a skeleton pier picked clean by raindrops. Across the water, the houses of two GM executives shimmered in the heat, swaying in it as though dancing cheek-to-cheek.

  “Your grandmother?” I said.

  “My mom’s mom.”

  That was it: the only time, in all the years I knew her, that Theresa mentioned her mother.

  Her mother died when we were in second grade. I didn’t find out that she died in her car in the garage with the doors closed and the engine turned on until my mother told me fifteen years later, when she also told me that Theresa was the one who found her.

  At that moment, in the lake, I wanted to ask Theresa about her mother. I could barely remember her. I don
’t know why I was so curious. But the morning had magic in it already, courtesy of Barbara, and Theresa’s legs in the water, and the dragonflies all around.

  Instead, I asked, “Is your grandmother why your dad let you come to Red-Gray Day?”

  As usual, Theresa didn’t answer right away. Then she said, “Last night, my grandmother said getting old is like becoming a lake.”

  “A lake,” I said, and shuddered, thinking of my own icebound nightmares.

  “Yeah. Everyone starts looking at you and not seeing you, and when you get all the way still and flat and just reflect, like a mirror, you’re dead.” She was holding her foot up in front of her, watching the bottom silt slide down her toes. I watched too, thinking abruptly about Barbara Fox’s leg. I was having an interesting day as far as lower limbs were concerned.

  “Looks like worms,” I said.

  “Blood,” said Theresa.

  “Your foot throwing up.”

  Both of us laughed. Her leg slipped back beneath the surface. Every few seconds, I heard the suck of her feet in the mud, as if something was exhuming itself. I kept my own feet where they were.

  “Sometimes I think you’re my friend,” Theresa said, and as she adjusted the ribbon in her hair, the bow of her mouth unstrung for a second and went slack. And for a moment, I thought maybe I was.

  “Like when?” I asked.

  She smiled. “Like when you beat me at stuff.” Her smile spread, not out but down, deeper inside her. She opened her mouth and said something else, but I didn’t catch it because Jon Goblin’s voice erupted behind us.

  “Hoot-hoot,” he crowed, in the falsetto that he and his friends used for taunting, although it never sounded like taunting when Jon did it. His hoot was too cheerful.

  I caught a glimpse of Theresa’s face as I whirled, saw her eyes aimed out over the lake but the smile still in place, and I realized, too late, that we could have stayed. I could have kept my back aligned with hers and ignored Jon Goblin and we could have stayed.

  “Mattie and Theresa standing in the lake,” said Jon Goblin, flashing his Goblin grin. “Are they going to shake-and-bake? Hoot-hoot.”

  “Look at his sneakers,” Theresa said to me.

  No matter how much wet grass, lake muck, and pine-forest scum Jon Goblin plowed through, his Pumas stayed white. His blond hair hung flat and combed on his head, except in one spot near his right ear where it ballooned like a bubble-gum bubble.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Becoming the lake,” I said.

  But Theresa didn’t hear me. She was already out of the water, wiping her feet in the grass. Her smile had succumbed once more to the set of her mouth.

  And so, despite everything, I really did wind up at school with my wheelbarrow. For two and a half hours, I bided my time, totaling scores for the tetherball tourney, the shoe kick, the two-soccer-field backward dash, which Jon Goblin won by a soccer field and a half. Then, just before lunch, I spotted Mrs. Van-Ellis with her back turned and her hands in their customary clasp behind her back. She didn’t even notice me until the handcuffs snapped home around her wrists, and by then it was too late. I was charging forward behind the wheelbarrow with my white smock flying behind me. She must have seen me at the last second because she bent her legs to lessen the impact and let herself flop into the wheelbarrow as I jabbed it beneath her—not hard; I wasn’t trying to hurt her—and then she was falling, yelling, “Mattie, ow!”

  “Crazy woman comin’ through,” I howled, and shoved us onto the soccer field. The MEADOWBROOK LOONY BIN sign with the drooling faces I’d painted tumbled off the side with the first lurch. And Mrs. Van-Ellis proved heavier and harder to wheel than I thought. But I pushed her a good three steps through the throng before toppling both of us into the goalie box. When I looked up, she had somehow scrambled to her feet. She almost laughed, then stood there shaking her head and flexing her legs.

  “Get these things off me,” she said, gesturing with her chin at her manacled hands.

  From somewhere in the crowd I heard someone say “Hoot-hoot” softly. I looked around for Jon but couldn’t see him. Theresa had disappeared too. Guilt—and more than guilt, confusion—settled around me and yanked itself taut. The feeling, I think, was a protective thing, intended to freeze me, so I couldn’t do anything else to the world. I’d never experienced it before.

  Mrs. Jupp, our principal, pretty much waved the whole thing off, though she said it “showed an uncharacteristic lapse in judgment.” In the midst of this brief lecture in her office, Mrs. Van-Ellis appeared at the door with an ice pack on the back of her thigh.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, interrupting Mrs. Jupp. I was sorry and something else too: electrified, somehow. Tingling.

  “Also shows his goddamn creativity,” said Mrs. Van-Ellis.

  Mrs. Jupp clucked and said, “Nancy.”

  My mom picked me up forty-five minutes later. As usual, she’d managed to miss some of her hair dye, and a jagged trickle of it had dried on her temple like blood from a bullet wound. She did not smile at me.

  I sat in the car in the heat and felt as if I were choking. I fantasized briefly about suffocating to death right there in the passenger seat. My mother wouldn’t notice until I was already something other people looked into without seeing, just as Theresa’s grandmother had said. But as we pulled into our driveway, my mother grabbed my arm and studied me with such a serious, unfamiliar expression that I stopped choking and started to cry.

  “Sssh,” she said, straightening my hair and leaving her arm outstretched, as though she thought I might fall. “Not so safe yet, huh?”

  Chapter 6 - 1976

  Even before it had ended, the summer of 76 seemed like something the whole city dreamed. Downtown, the twin spires of the still-new Renaissance Center towered like lighthouses over the riverfront, so resplendent in glass and chrome, dominating the collapsing warehouses and wasted lots around them, that they actually seemed capable of luring new families back to those infamous neighborhoods

  At Tiger Stadium, on a miserable night in June when the heat haze rolled over the light stanchions and sank into the bleachers, I took turns with my father and eight-year-old brother Brent in the one seat we had that wasn’t behind a post and got my first glimpse of Mark the Bird Fidrych. His curly hair erupted out of his cap like humidity-activated popcorn. His uniform pants were smeared with dirt from sudden dips to his knees to smooth out ripples in the mound and chat with the resin bag. His mouth chewed words instead of tobacco as he cheered his own pitches. Every time he struck somebody out (which wasn’t often, even then), the stadium’s antiquated sound system would crackle with drum and guitar, and the whole crowd—and there were crowds, that one stolen summer—would leap to its collective feet to stomp and sway to “Surfin’ Bird.”

  On the first weekend after school was out, I set up my Strat-O-Matic tabletop baseball set on our screened-in porch, opened the pouch full of just-printed player cards from the season before, and played the first game of the 1976 Mattie-Ball season: Detroit vs. Cleveland at cavernous Municipal Stadium. Ben Oglivie homered off Jim Kern in the bottom of the eighth to win it for the Tigers. With no giveaway display of emotion, I packed up the two teams, checked the schedule, pulled out Baltimore and Milwaukee, and kept playing. That evening, after dinner, I went outside with my mitt and glove and wiffle ball and reenacted Oglivie’s moment three times. Over and over, at the proper instant, I stepped up to the bare patch of grass I used for home plate and drove the wiffle ball over our red slat fence into Kevin Dent’s yard. The last time, I looked up and spotted Kevin and his pal Grange creeping into the bushes to spy on me. With a grimace, I stoppered the flow of sportscaster-speak, stepped up to the bare spot, tossed the ball in the air, and parked Ben Oglivie’s home run one more time anyway.

  When my mother wasn’t working in the yard, she was at the special ed school administering tests to autistic kids. My brother Brent would watch Tattletales and The Price Is Right, then
head for Cider Lake with Dean, our freckle-faced neighbor, in the afternoon. My father would come home from his job at the GM research lab and play stickball with us and whomever Brent had brought home for dinner, then duck into the living room to tinker with his speaker cables. For as long as I could remember, he’d been trying to coax sound from that stereo. Finally, at the end of June, he ushered the whole family into the den and waved his hand over the black box he called an amplifier, once, twice, three times, his mouth moving like Mark the Bird’s, and then hit the ON button. The system burped once, hummed a few seconds, and shut itself down with a shriek. My father beamed as though he’d just delivered a baby.

  Sometimes I’d go to the lake, where Brent and his friends—every one of them taller than I was, even though I’d grown almost an inch that spring—would occasionally stop calling me weird-ass long enough to let me show them how to do the butterfly and backstroke. Thursday nights I went to Mini-Mike’s with Joe Whitney and Jon Goblin; even Theresa came along when she wasn’t studying for Compu-Kids. Bikers had begun frequenting Mini-Mike’s, and though they never spoke to us, sometimes one or more of them would get up off the orange stools surrounding the track so we could view it properly. Theresa’s People Eater was the fastest car in the place, but she still couldn’t drive it very well. My father had helped me build my own machine, a gun-gray Mustang that tore past the miniature palm trees and roadside Harley shops and dinosaur pits lining Mini-Mike’s slot tracks. Even against the bikers, I won a lot.

  I remember July fourth on the banks of the Detroit River, the day the country turned two hundred years old. I lay on a blanket among the packs of suburban white people who’d streamed into downtown to see if it was still there. It was the biggest—and most integrated—crowd at the riverside since the riots. Right before the fireworks started, I twisted myself over on my back and began rolling down the bank between and over blankets, somehow hitting no one, all the way to the bottom of the hillside in a whirl of faces and skyscraper and sky. As the ground leveled beneath me, the bicentennial display boomed overhead, and lights erupted, and I watched the sky rain red, white, and blue ashes over the water, which still rolled, steely and savage under all the oil and sewage and industrial waste.