Rick Moody - The Ice Storm

MORE ABOUT TELEVISION. From Sunrise Semester to Love, American Style, from Banacek to The New Price Is Right, television served as the structured time, the safe harbor for Wendy Hood. She gave the dial a spin, she let it land wherever it would, afternoons when she avoided extracurriculars — field hockey or Bible study or Super-8 Cinematography or the Quilting Club — mornings when her parents weren’t up or had left early for church, evenings when, again, she was by herself.

She loved Electric Company and Sesame Street though she was too old for them, loved the hyperbole of puppets and the restless, kinetic pacing of these programs. The shape of advertisements ruled the world. Advertisements and comic books and teen fanzines. As she watched television, she gave herself back to her childhood, to some part of herself that had never passed beyond that demographic category. But she also loved reruns: The Flying Nun, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, and Family Affair. She loved Gene Rayburn and Monty Hall. She respected enforcers of justice, such as Cannon, Kojak, and Toma-Tony Mu-sante, so cute — and elegies to place, like Streets of San Francisco and Hawaii Five-0; she loved variety programs, Sonny and Cher and Flip Wilson and Andy Williams and Ray Stevens, who had parlayed his hit “Everything Is Beautiful” into a summer replacement program that year; but she lived for the Saturday night horror films — Chiller Theater and Creature Features.

The Chiller theme’s graphic was especially satisfying, a six-fingered hand emerging from some rank Paleolithic ooze. This was a gigantic hand — it dwarfed, just behind it, a tree plucked clean as a piece of driftwood, so that you could get a sense of the scale — a hand the size of a Mack truck. The fingers waved around a little bit, as though signaling to you not to abandon the show during the commercial. Meanwhile, a deep and ominous voice, a voice kind of like the one that announced the radio spots for local drag- and stock-car racing, intoned the word chiller. Long, low, and slow, this guy declaimed it, like it was a wind-borne message of evil sweeping across a steppe.

Mostly she watched television alone, since the days were gone when Paul snuggled with her through the horror flicks. She was alone that Friday night in the drafty library along the Silvermine River. She had a Duraflame log in the fireplace and a blanket wrapped around her, but the cold was relentless anyway. Snow fell, cascading, out in the driveway. Gales circled the house like the sound effects of low-budget movies. On the box, during the breaks, WPIX heralded tomorrow evening’s dramatic television presentation — first ever — of the Shroud of Turin. Through these announcements Wendy had grown accustomed to this textile, to the faint traces of a likeness there, and in the midst of this dreamy evening of martyrdom and B-films, the scary weather outside seemed to be appropriate, like Old Testament vengeance.

She had played hooky during Sunday School and confirmation classes. Unitarian services: her mother had left the church of her birth and was on this Unitarian kick, though she still tried to keep Wendy interested in Episco-palianism. All the neighbors went. Wendy hated the discipline of waking early on Sunday — though she was up by then anyway — the donning of starchy and uncomfortable clothes, the confusing silence whenever she prayed, the confusing banter of church doctrine. Wendy felt the American Indians had the most reliable religion — with their peyote buttons and tricksters. When her mother scrunched up her face and dispensed morality, Wendy’s ambition was to be as unlike her mother as possible in every way. In fact, this was almost always her ambition. Her mother’s judgmental rap was her only real conversation. Sometimes Wendy felt her mom had turned deaf-mute or slipped into a coma; other times, the significance of Elena Hood’s un-happiness, in the midst of plenty, in the midst of a town with forests, streams, and shopkeepers who remembered your name, a town of school crossing-guards who told you to dress warmly and policemen whose kids were the stars of the football team — the significance of her mother’s un-happiness settled over the house and gathered all of the Hoods around it.

To avoid this trouble, Wendy got herself into trouble elsewhere. At a slumber party after her birthday, earlier in this very month, she had put her tongue in Debby Armit-age’s vagina. It happened suddenly, as if she hadn’t been responsible for it somehow. She could recall the moment she yanked down her own pajamas and hiked up Debby’s nightgown. In the corner, Sally Miller watched with an expression of excitement and horror both. Debby stood on the bed, her long, pubescent lower half uncovered except for heavy socks. Wendy parted Debby’s legs gently, and in a posture that could only be described as religious, importunate, she craned upward to fit the tip of her tongue under the bed of Debby’s soft, new, blond pubic hair. With one hand she cradled the perfect, divine curve of her friend’s ass.

The taste was no taste at all. There was none of the rich marine life that she had read about in Paul’s stash of sexually explicit materials. Debby Armitage was as clean as church clothes. No arousal disturbed the folds and recesses of Debby’s vagina; no moisture, besides what moisture Wendy’s tongue brought there. Still, the two of them went on with it. Sally Miller watched as Debby and Wendy positioned one another for mutual oral gratification — it was a position that dawned on them the way a small child stumbles upon the revelation of placing round pegs in round holes; Sally was watching in a state of frightened excitement, it seemed, and later in a state of arousal, though Debby and Wendy were no nearer a climax of any kind than if they had been outside raking leaves.

Sally, however, was able to take the story public at Saxe Junior High. She was still in the eighth grade. Because of her nonparticipation, she could go public. She could offer her opinions as observer and critic. She could stonewall on the subject of her own motives. Wendy had never wished, even in her idle algebra class fantasies, that she was a hummingbird darting between the legs of Debby Armitage. Not really. Though she hankered after some association with the people of her town, some sense of community that stuck deeper than the country club stuff. On the other hand, there was something compulsive about the way she got entangled, as though Wendy herself had picked the posture and activity that would most make her feel ashamed.

This strategy turned out to be pretty effective. Sally Miller talked her up. Talked up her transgression, her instigation, her perversion. Her reputation as a slut spread quickly along the corridors of Saxe and across the street to the high school. She could sense at a distance of twenty or thirty lockers the snickering threesomes of popular girls. Now Sally Miller entombed herself in the Saxe library, that resource of the uncool, and even abandoned her Friday elective across the street at the high school, co-ed sports, in order to avoid Wendy Hood. At the same time, Debby Armitage was Wendy’s friend for life, and actually Wendy didn’t like her that much at all. Debby was a whiner.

So she changed the channel again, turned away from advertisements for the Shroud of Turin (Robert Conrad to host), to watch instead a Movie of the Week about a woman who was buried alive by avaricious kidnappers, buried alive and kept that way in a lighted, ventilated box (with one of those gerbil spouts in it, through which she could suck in water and nutrients). Ants swarmed over the woman.