Charles Baxter - Gryphon - New and Selected Stories

“You don’t want to come?”

“No,” I said. “I’ll walk home.” I gazed up the hill, and in the distance I could see the lights of our house, a twenty-minute walk across the bay.

“Okay,” Stephanie said. “I didn’t think you’d want to come along.” We waited. “Russell, do you think your brother is interested in me?”

“I guess so,” I said. I wasn’t sure what she meant by “interested.” Anybody interested him, up to a point. “He says he likes you.”

“That’s funny, because I feel like something in the Lost and Found,” she said, scratching her boot into the ice. “You know, one of those gloves that don’t match anything.” She put her hand on my shoulder. “One glove. One left-hand glove, with the thumb missing.”

I could hear Ben’s car starting, and then I saw it heading down Gallagher’s boat landing. I was glad he was driving out toward us, because I didn’t want to talk to her this way anymore.

Stephanie was now watching my brother’s car. His headlights were on. It was odd to see a car with headlights on out on the ice, where there was no road. I saw my brother accelerate and fishtail the car, then slam on the brakes and do a 360-degree spin. He floored it, revving the back wheels, which made a high, whining sound on the ice, like a buzz saw working through wood. He was having a thrill and soon would give Stephanie another thrill by driving her home across ice that might break at any time. Thrills did it, whatever it was. Thrills led to other thrills.

“Would you look at that,” I said.

She turned. After a moment she made a little sound in her throat. I remember that sound. When I see her now, she still makes it — a sign of impatience or worry. After all, she didn’t go through the ice in my brother’s car on the way home. She and my brother didn’t drown, together or separately. Stephanie had two marriages and several children. Recently, she and her second husband adopted a Korean baby. She has the complex dignity of many small-town people who do not resort to alcohol until well after night has fallen. She continues to live in Five Oaks, Michigan, and she works behind the counter at the post office, where I buy stamps from her and gossip, holding up the line, trying to make her smile. She still has an overbite and she still laughs easily, despite the moody expression that comes over her when she relaxes. She has moved back to the same house she grew up in. Even now the exterior paint on that house blisters in cobweb patterns. I keep track of her. She and my brother certainly didn’t get married; in fact, they broke up a few weeks after seeing the Chevrolet under ice.

“What are we doing out here?” Stephanie asked. I shook my head. “In the middle of winter, out here on this stupid lake? I’ll tell you, Russell, I sure don’t know. But I do know that your brother doesn’t notice me enough, and I can’t love him unless he notices me. You know your brother. You know what he pays attention to. What do I have to do to get him to notice me?”

I was twelve years old. I said, “Take off your shoes.”

She stood there, thinking about what I had said, and then, quietly, she bent down and took off her boots, and, putting her hand on my shoulder to balance herself, she took off her brown loafers and her white socks. She stood there in front of me with her bare feet on the ice. I saw in the grayish January light that her toenails were painted. Bare feet with painted toenails on the ice — this was a desperate and beautiful sight, and I shivered and felt my fingers curling inside my gloves.

“How does it feel?” I asked.

“You’ll know,” she said. “You’ll know in a few years.”

My brother drove up close to us. He rolled down his window and opened the passenger-side door. He didn’t say anything. I watched Stephanie get into the car, carrying her shoes and socks and boots, and then I waved good-bye to them before turning to walk back to our house. I heard the car heading north across the ice. My brother would be looking at Stephanie’s bare feet on the floor of his car. He would probably not be saying anything just now.

When I reached our front lawn, I stood out in the dark and looked in through the kitchen window. My mother and stepfather were sitting at the kitchen counter; I couldn’t be sure if they were speaking to each other, but then I saw my mother raise her arm in one of her can-you-believe-this gestures. I didn’t want to go inside. I wanted to feel cold, so cold that the cold itself became permanently interesting. I took off my overcoat and my gloves. Tilting my head back, I felt some snow fall onto my face. I thought of the word “exposure” and of how once or twice a year deer hunters in the Upper Peninsula died of it, and I bent down and stuck my hand into the snow and frozen grass and held it there. The cold rose from my hand to my elbow, and when I had counted to forty and couldn’t stand another second of it, I picked up my coat and gloves and walked into the bright heat of the front hallway.

WHAT HE FIRST NOTICED about Detroit and therefore America was the smell. Almost as soon as he walked off the plane, he caught it: an acrid odor of wood ash. The smell seemed to go through his nostrils and take up residence in his head. In Sweden, his own country, he associated this smell with autumn, and the first family fires of winter, the smoke chuffing out of chimneys and settling familiarly over the neighborhood. But here it was midsummer, and he couldn’t see anything burning.

On the way in from the airport, with the windows of the cab open and hot stony summer air blowing over his face, he asked the driver about it.

“You’re smelling Detroit,” the driver said.

Anders, who spoke very precise school English, thought that perhaps he hadn’t made himself understood. “No,” he said. “I am sorry. I mean the burning smell. What is it?”

The cabdriver glanced in the rearview mirror. He was wearing a knitted beret, and his dreadlocks flapped in the breeze. “Where you from?”

“Sweden.”

The driver nodded to himself. “Explains why,” he said. The cab took a sharp right turn on the freeway and entered the Detroit city limits. The driver gestured with his left hand toward an electronic signboard, a small windowless factory at its base, and a clustered group of cramped clapboard houses nearby. When he gestured, the cab wobbled on the freeway. “Fires here most all the time,” he said. “Day in and day out. You get so you don’t notice. Or maybe you get so you do notice and you like it.”

“I don’t see any fires,” Anders said.

“That’s right.”

Feeling that he was missing the point somehow, Anders decided to change the subject. “I see a saxophone and a baseball bat next to you,” he said, in his best English. “Do you like to play baseball?”

“Not in this cab, I don’t,” the driver said quietly. “It’s no game then, you understand?”

The young man sat back, feeling that he had been defeated by the American idiom in his first native encounter with it. An engineer, he was in Detroit to discuss his work in metal alloys that resist oxidation. The company that had invited him had suggested that he might agree to become a consultant on an exclusive contract, for what seemed to him an enormous, American-sized fee. But the money meant little to him. It was America he was curious about, attracted by, especially its colorful disorderliness.

Disorder, of which there was very little in Sweden, seemed sexy to him: the disorder of a disheveled woman who has rushed down two flights of stairs to offer a last long kiss. Anders was single, and before he left the country he hoped to sleep with an American woman in an American bed. It was his ambition. He wondered if the experience would have any distinction. He had an idea that he might be able to go home and tell one or two friends about it.