Rick Moody - The Ice Storm

This ended the conversation. Her mother restrained Wendy in a choke hold. The room turned sideways, and suddenly Wendy was screaming, crying, and being dragged along the front hall. The details she could make out in the midst of this grim procession were strangely satisfying: the Oriental rug in the front hall bunched up under her heels; the morning sun reflected on the brass frame of a mirror in the front hall; her mother’s face, distorted in the frame. Water was dripping somewhere. Her mother’s strength was all out of proportion with her tiny, retiring body. In the bathroom — by the entrance to the basement — her mother held Wendy’s mouth shut, clamped her palm there, and ran the tap with one hand. She immersed a handy little soap ball under the tap, until it had a good head of lather, and then she forced her daughter’s mouth open — Wendy was begging for her not to do it, but these cries were wordless, strangled — and forced the wet, soapy ball into her mouth. Elena held Wendy’s mouth shut again.

Wendy might have, ought to have, struck her mother back. She felt in her rage that she ought to have struck her mother, knocked out her straight, white, capped teeth, watched the blood flow across them (those faintly lipsticked teeth, even now faintly lipsticked), stepped over her mother’s body stretched out on the floor — but she didn’t. In an isolated chamber in her heart she complied with this torture. Maybe she had a feeling about what was coming next. She accepted it, accepted her humiliation, and the burning taste in her mouth and throat. Her limbs were weak. At last, her mother released her and she gagged and spit the little, blue soap on the crocheted rug on the floor. She wept.

— Let’s have some breakfast, her mother said. Her voice was chilly and strange.

Wendy collapsed into a heap on the floor.

— Get up now, her mother said. Get up off the floor. But Wendy wouldn’t move.

— Pick that up and get up off the floor. She lay there.

This time when her mother moved Wendy’s body, when she lifted that frail doll’s body from the bathroom floor, Wendy knew she was barely capable. Her mother’s superhuman strength, the force field of care that surrounded her, these had all failed. Wendy would win in the end, just because she would live longer. This was how family was a bluff, a series of futile power grabs. Love was water torture, and sex was the physical abuse part of love, so sex was the torturous part of torture. Except that family was the worst torture of all.

They repaired to the kitchen, then, as though it was the last-chance kitchen, the last place where they might share a notion about women being together. It came over them all at once, how they could make breakfast for the men, the men upstairs. It was for the men, but it was for themselves, too. Wendy and her mom might, through the alchemy of breakfast, repair the situation before going home. Wendy moved in the kitchen like a wraith. Not talking to her mom. Eyes red. Swollen. Since the Williamses’ stove was gas, Elena Hood was able to put on the kettle. She searched around the kitchen for a drip coffeemaker. She motioned wordlessly for Wendy to set the breakfast table. They rummaged through Janey Williams’s drawers. Then, in the next room, the den: Wendy mushed up the old issues of the Stamford Advocate and the New York Times and made a small pyramid of kindling on the grate over these rumpled sheets. The sounds of her mother’s modest domestic activities comforted her. She reached for the Ohio Blue Tip matches (strikes on any surface). She struck a match on her zipper, as Mike had once taught her to do.

And when Mr. Williams and Sandy ventured into the kitchen, Mike was on their minds. The fire wasn’t going very well, and the two men squatted down beside her to advise on the subject. It was their job, right? To advise?

Mr. Williams used the fire iron to nudge Wendy’s Duraflame log around a little bit. Sandy manned the bellows.

— Wendy, Mr. Williams said calmly, as he poked the fire, you didn’t see Mike last night, did you?

She told him how she had been at home watching the film about the buried woman. By the time she got over to their house, Mike was already gone. The words hurt, coming out of her mouth. All words hurt. They tasted corrosive.

— Sandy said he was at Silver Meadow, she said, but then maybe I might have seen him there on the way by. Or maybe not. I might have seen him if he was out on the hill sledding or just running around or something.

— But he also said he might go down to see Danny Spofford, Sandy said.

Jim Williams placed one hand on his son’s head, and one on Wendy’s. He stood.

— Keep your hands off each other while I make this phone call, okay? You two monsters—

And he was smiling as he picked up the phone by the upright piano — sheet music on the stand for Moon River. But when he realized that the phone lines were down, too, his countenance changed. Out in the kitchen, suddenly, Wendy could hear him talking it over with her mother.

— You don’t think that Janey picked him up somewhere, do you?

— He’s probably fine, Elena said. He’s probably down at our house having sausages with Ben.

— The phone’s dead.

— I don’t think you should overdo this. The house was still for a moment. The fire consumed its fodder.

Then Mr. Williams said:

— Okay, you two, c’mon in here, because the time has come for a little discussion.

Wendy and Sandy were warm in one another’s company. In front of the fire. Not talking, not feeling comfortable even, just there. Not knowing what had happened with the vodka the night before, unsure of how it got them here. Silenced by the power of the vodka to take events and reshape them somehow, to make them wild. Wendy didn’t feel like she knew Sandy exactly, but there was something she shared with him now. He offered her the bellows and she squirted a tentative stream of air on the artificial log in the fireplace. Sandy picked up the fire iron and stabbed the log savagely. A shower of blue, green, and red sparks exploded from it. Wendy choked, trying to swallow again. The lye was in her now. Traveling in her bloodstream, clogging her liver.

The two of them padded into the kitchen, where Elena Hood arranged strips of bacon on a large skillet, broke eggs into a mixing bowl, searched for her miracle ingredient, paprika. These culinary efforts belied her shock, the blank, numb look she had, a look Wendy understood clearly, but that was lost on the Williamses. Still, Elena had reached some sort of an agreement with Jim Williams, somewhere along the line — this was obvious, in the way they gingerly circled around each other in the kitchen, in circles along the linoleum, not lovingly, exactly, but respectfully. Honoring each other just a little. Some kind of impermanent appreciation, which didn’t admit all the ups and downs but was heady for a brief moment. The result of this appreciation was going to be a joint lecture. Mr. Williams pointed to the the breakfast table. Sandy and Wendy sat.

— Okay. Uh, everybody comfortable? Williams stood, right at the edge of the parquet in the alcove, with his arms folded. All right. Now, this isn’t an easy thing we have to talk about this morning but I think we have to talk about it anyway, and that’s why it is that your mother, Wendy, stayed here last night and not at your house…. She stayed here with me last night. That’s, uh, the first thing we have to tell you. And although the reason she stayed was primarily the electricity and the fact that we had to, uh, abandon the car in a ditch up on Ferris Hill Road, it would be dishonest if I didn’t tell you that we did spend the night together… in the… on the water bed. I have to be clear about this, kids. Now, sometimes as a marriage gets familiar it starts to age a little bit — this happens sometimes. It just happens that the people who are married — like your mother and I, Sandy, or Benjamin and Elena — get to a point where they want a little something in their marriage. They get to a point when they find themselves, uh, straying away. Look, it’s not that complicated. It’s sort of the way you might want A.1. sauce on your burger one week and mustard the next. It’s that simple. Or the way you might want to go to a McDonald’s one Saturday and to the Darien Pizza Restaurant the next time. Marriage contracts, yeah, that’s right. It gets smaller. It’s hard to get back to that place of just liking each other, or else you love one another, your love is strong, but you just don’t care for one another in the way you did. And society teaches us right now that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing to want — to want some spice. It’s an okay thing. It’s a little far out, it shakes some people up, but it’s okay. Your mother and I and probably Mrs. and Mr. Hood, too, well, we grew up at a time when, no matter what kinds of desires you were experiencing in your marriage, it was considered wrong to violate these vows that you took at the altar. What happened because of this was that our parents and their parents were angry… angry and ticked off at each other for just wanting a little variety. They were yelling at each other and sleeping in separate bedrooms and ignoring their kids — ignoring us, because we were the kids then! — while they were battling against each other — battling — for the right to have these desires. These weird little infatuations. That’s right.