Rick Moody: The Ice Storm

What did it mean to dry out? She had seen the lonely and decrepit emerging from the Mercedes and BMWs. They wore suede and fur and bangles or matching denim suits; they checked to be sure the car door was locked because issues of security were important to them. They tried to memorize their spot in the parking lot and failed. She saw them walking aimlessly around the parking lot, forgetting. What they had in common besides their wealth were their anguished faces. They had rings and minks but they were worn out and desperate. You could tip them over just by blowing hard. And they weren’t violent or criminal. They were just people. As far as Wendy could tell. No hardened serial killers sodomizing young girls and leaving their bodies in rural creeks. Wendy was among her people here on the premises of Silver Meadow. From all around the country, from New York and Cleveland and Athens and Dallas and Las Vegas, they came to Silver Meadow for the cure of folly. She didn’t want to overstay her welcome here — she didn’t want to exhaust its riches — but she liked the place better than her hometown. And that was why, on Friday afternoon, she was here waiting for Mikey Williams.

Rain. Some fat, smiling weatherman would say it was raw. New Canaan was maybe a single degree about freezing. Surfaces contracted. There had been hail, too. Her poncho didn’t keep out the cold, but she withstood it,

shivering, because she was precociously brilliant — every-one said so — and impractical. Anything was better than the homely, pink ski jacket her mom had bought her. Originally, it wasn’t Mike Williams but his brother, Sandy, with whom these trysts had taken place. He was a jumpy, quiet boy and Wendy liked how he was shocked by her, how he was always a little bit uncomfortable when she was around, how he didn’t want to kiss with his mouth open; she liked how he was always skulking off to work on a model airplane, one of those monuments to futility and boredom. He was a challenge.

One afternoon she successfully persuaded him to let her enter the bathroom with him. It was just the sort of pas-time they got into over the years. Wendy had wrestled with him at touch football; she had eaten the sandwich ends he left behind — cream cheese and jelly, Fluffernutter, deviled ham; she had shared her Mountain Dew with him and tortured insects with him. Though Sandy didn’t talk much, Wendy thought what he thought and knew what he knew. Until that time in the bathroom.

The Williamses’ downstairs bathroom was wallpapered in a velvet floral print. As Sandy unzipped his tiny shorts (this was the summer just past), and squatted down over the toilet, the absolute nakedness of his skeletal body struck her. There wasn’t a fold or pouch on him. He was like a little National Geographic photograph-the wise villager struggling against famine.

And then there was his dick. It was no more than a little outcropping. It looked like the end of a number-two pencil, the part you throw out because it would be too short to extract from the sharpener. Not a hair surrounded this appendage. Sandy was as blank as a newborn, as simple as one of those modern pictures — all black or all white or all red — that any kid could do. He reposed on the toilet like a little girl, and began to empty himself. But then the enormity of being observed in this private ritual, this ritual of cleanliness messed him up. It was like she had stumbled into his sleep and learned all about his nightmares. Immobilized on the commode, he started to shout:

— What do you want? What do you want? Get out! Get out of here!

His usually peaceful face became twisted and raw as he rose up toward her. Brass-colored urine trickled lazily down his thigh-under his bunched, unfastened safari shorts — onto the throw rug. No girlish smile was going to get her out of this.

Mrs. Williams must have heard the commotion. She pulled Wendy out by the ear. But because Mrs. Williams was cool and because she approved of the basic changes brought about by young people in the last five or six years, she let Wendy off with just a few cautionary words. A person’s body was his temple, Mrs. Williams had said, and it was his decision when to worship there and when to fast or rest. Did she understand? A person’s body was his first and last possession. We come into this world alone, Mrs. Williams said, and we permit this aloneness to be understood by another maybe once or twice in a whole life. And in adolescence, which Wendy probably knew about from her own parents, our bodies betray us. They grow strange. That was why, Mrs. Williams said, in Samoa, and in other developing nations, adolescents went out into the woods on foot, unarmed, and didn’t come back until they had learned a thing or two.

Sandy hated her after that, as Mike and Sandy hated each other. Wendy knew already how boys fought when they were close. They fought the way families fought. The explosions and the affections came out of the same place. She had seen Mike chase Sandy with a fire iron one day, fully intending to put out his brother’s charcoal eyes, the next day volunteering to write Sandy’s poem for English class. They were more alike than not, those two boys. She watched Sandy and she learned how silence could conceal all kinds of high jinks. Still waters ran organized criminal networks and spearheaded new pornographic markets. Mike and Sandy were the same way except Mike was loud about it. They called each other Charles (and it was a term of respect) and they never went in the other’s bedroom, but the loved each other and would die inside when they parted for good.

An example of their unsavory entrepreneurial activities:

Mr. Williams had negotiated a deal with the folks at Topps Chewing Gum. What the deal was, nobody could ever explain to Wendy. She wasn’t sure Sandy or Mike understood it either. Bazooka gum, among the principal product lines of Topps, was a factor in the deal. As a result, the Williamses ended up with several large crates of Bazooka. These crates were warehoused in their basement. Bazooka, which was like a gold standard at Saxe Junior High and at New Canaan High School, was thus available to Mike and Sandy in gross quantities for use at school. With it, Mike was able to produce an impeccable collection of the 1973 New York Mets baseball cards (which didn’t help them win the World Series). With Bazooka Joe he had also procured fake vomit, a T-shirt that said Enjoy Cocaine in the same letters as the Enjoy Coca-Cola commercial, many types and varieties of firecrackers, such as M-80s and lady-fingers and bottle rockets, and a red Flexible Flyer sled. Sandy had turned his gum into currency, for a price slightly above retail, and filled a gigantic change bank with the money. He just liked to count the stuff.

How Mike bested Sandy in the battle for Wendy’s body, a prize she was pretty willing to give up anyway, isn’t much of a story. Sandy wouldn’t look at her after the bathroom incident, and there was no one else suitable within a mile or so with whom to lock arms and make flimsy vows. She missed Sandy, but she was always missing something, and that little naked spot wasn’t going to be filled by him or by anyone else on Valley Road. It was through the chewing gum, ultimately, that Mike had lured her, alone, into the basement with him. She had walked among those boxes as carefully as if this were some vast arms shipment. The sheer amount of gum dumbfounded her! What kid in their age and class would not kill for a twenty-four-count box of Bazooka rolls? Who cared about the endless fillings, about the horror of dentistry? Today a kid is here, tomorrow she is grown! Gum! Give us gum! We are hungry for gum!

And Mike was prepared to honor her wishes. He popped a piece in his mouth right then. She could smell it. She could taste the taste — amusement park and industrial cleaning agent. Together — shoulders brushed up against one another like they were already pledged to troth — they read the comic, laughing at how Sandy was like the guy, Mort, who always wore a turtleneck up over his mouth.