Rick Moody - The Ice Storm

This quarter hour was the last time when the Hoods and the Williamses would be this close, when their stories would be so easily told together, when, if there was going to be conversation on the subject of those keys and that party, or about dry-humping and teenaged drinking, or about the misshapen affection that bound these people, such talk should have taken place. They would be neighbors for a while yet. Look, Elena knew that apology was the impossible paragraph, its words were like the secret names of God. Simple apology, simple acknowledgment. That stuff, all that stuff that happened, it’s all forgotten. It’s history. Simple, right? They were all forgiven and free, unshackled, liberated to go and unravel the narratives of their lives. They were free to take up their fates, to take up their nameless destinies. So why didn’t apology come to Elena’s lips? Or to Benjamin’s? Elena wanted to say all this, to say impossible, ancient words of confession and absolution. And she knew that if she didn’t, she was condemned to watch the blunders of the past come around again for a revival, an encore presentation. So she did her best. She reached out for Janey and whispered to her a few unsatisfactory words, pittances. Oh, Janey, oh, Janey, I’m so so so sorry. Oh, I am so sorry. Their embrace was brief. And then Benjamin caught them at this moment and he wanted to be part of it. He touched his wife’s shoulder and then Janey’s shoulder. Neither seemed to notice. He stood awkwardly there. And then he turned toward the kids. Wendy and Sandy were facing away, toward the woods, toward the security of fallen trees, plotting the next ten years.

They were transfixed, the Hoods and Williamses, by the spectacle of a lost future. It brought them together and it drove them apart but maybe this parting was inevitable anyway. Soon the car was jumped, and the police were gone, and Jim Williams, in the ambulance, vanished into the underworld.

Wendy Hood’s bedroom. (They had walked Sandy and Janey over to the Steeles’ house, to wait for Jim, and then they had walked home, in single file.) Worn, balding teddy bear tossed aside on the corduroy bedspread. On the walls: posters of David Cassidy, the Dark Side of the Moon record sleeve, a peace symbol. Bumper sticker — Impeach Nixon — on the back of the door. All-in-one Magnavox record player with a warped copy of Neil Diamond’s Hot August Night resting on it. Side four, including “Mother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show.”

Wendy was sprawled diagonally across the bed with her face stuffed into the folds of a crumpled feather pillow. She was sad and frightened. There was a malevolence lurking in the postelectrical silence of her house. And Mike. She imagined death coming for him, death riding on her town’s rich, privileged winds, death as witches, single women with cats, coming for him and carrying him past the window where she, Wendy, dallied with his brother. No, she imagined Mike was alone somewhere, that the hereafter for him featured aloneness, just like he had been alone at the moment of his death. Power lines, they said.

She couldn’t follow a single thought to its conclusion. She couldn’t distinguish between Mike and Sandy, as she lay there on the bed. She saw Sandy in the basement with her, instead of Mike, or she suddenly believed that she had spent the night with Mike and that now Sandy was dead. Sex and death were all confused in her. Everything was all confused. She didn’t know what to do to console herself, if she even deserved consolation. She wanted to sleep in the bosom of the good people of New Canaan. She wanted to forget, to ride the pendulum away from this weekend and its bad luck.

But she had other impulses, too. She pulled the soiled garter belt out of the front of the jeans she had changed into and it emerged like the handkerchief of cheap legerdemain, that endless handkerchief of changing colors and styles — which reveals, in its ultimate fold, a gray and diseased pigeon. She had begun to mythologize this garter belt in the last hour or so. Its rank sea smell — tuna salad with mustard-honey dressing — mingling with the intoxicating smell of her own unwashed body. Its black, sultry shape, alluring and violent.

Wendy had to try it on. She didn’t make this decision, really, she just yielded to it. The river flowed in one direction and she paddled along with it. Flow. First she inhaled the human fumes of that garment. She cradled it. She had read in one of Paul’s cheap pornographic magazines — Out — that semen was both a good conditioner and a fine skin lotion. The smell of Mike’s lost progeny — the hint of the family he might have had — was thick upon her. This was what memory was like — it was all fingerprinted with desire. So, reveling in the good ideas falling away from her, Wendy began to unzip her jeans. Had the electricity been on, she would have played weepers on her Magnavox. She would have played death ballads on old, scratchy forty-fives.

With the hooks available, she locked the garment around the spot where her hips were beginning to blossom. She looked with horror at the precise fit of the thing. She stumbled, jeans and panties around her ankles, back onto her bed; she could see where her downy, blond pubic hair would vanish soon and give way to the thick, coarse tangle of womanhood. It sickened her. What had happened to Mike? What had she done to him? A few more years and she wouldn’t even be a kid anymore. She would bind her breasts tautly against her. She would preserve her chastity, starve her menses; she would keep herself free from wants. But even as she vowed these vows, she felt in herself the oblique stain of arousal. Wendy wiggled her hips on the bed, in Mike’s mother’s garter belt — as she was now sure it must be — feeling grief and need mixed up together.

In the thrall of the moment, her jeans knotting her ankles together, shivering, her ass — tickled by the straps of the garter belt — exposed to the chill air, she reached into the drawer of her unsturdy bedside table and found the Wilkinson double-bonded razor she had liberated from her parents’ bathroom.

She pulled up the sleeves of her turtleneck sweater. A tear appeared at the edge of her eye — from the pain — as she tested the blade on her wrist, delicately. A small test cut. It was just a scratch really, nothing like the fountain she deserved, the fountaining of blood you might get from a hair shirt, say, or from an undergarment fashioned with nails and tacks, each tipped with special preparations to attract insects and vermin. Wendy clenched her jaw. She raised a cold sweat on her brow. She pulled at clumps of her blond locks. And then she panicked. She could imagine cutting down to the bone, parting sinew and nerve and what fatty tissue was lodged there. She could imagine grappling with her own shiny bones, wresting them apart and scattering them on the carpet, but then she was begging Mike to pardon her, telling Mike that she couldn’t do it, that she was gonna have to stick around, Charles. She just couldn’t. Poor Mike, solitary ghost. Solitary ghost of New Canaan.

With jeans still twisted around her ankles, with a wrist presented as if in some kind of religious rite, Wendy waddled out into the hall and then into the bathroom.

There was no running water, because of the flood, but a bucket of cold water sat on the floor of the bathroom — for flushing the commode. Wendy plunged her wrist into this bucket. The cold water stung. The scratch on her forearm turned the water the color of a cranberry spritzer, the color of those transfusions of cranberry and ginger ale her mom used to give her when she was out sick from school. She hobbled toward the door, the blade still in her left hand. She squirmed to the edge of the staircase.