Jane Smiley - Early Warning

Donna Fitzgerald had skates, and one day she yelled at Michael and said that the pond was her very own. But there was a fence between her house and the pond, and the next day, Michael had watched in secret as Donna came out of her front door, walked to the road, turned right, and went toward the pond, her skates slung over her shoulder. If the pond were hers, she would not have walked there by the road. So the pond was not hers, according to Michael.

Richie said, “Well, it’s not ours, either.”

“But she can’t stop us, and we can go there whenever we like.”

She was a big girl. The other kids said she was eleven, or maybe twelve, but she was heavy-shouldered and she had breasts, and she also had big feet. She went to the public school, and the other kids also said that she should be in seventh grade but she had been held back twice, and she was still in fifth grade. Michael grabbed Richie and pushed him through the opening in the fence, and then kind of poked him so that he would walk along ahead. By this time, Donna was on the far side of the pond, lacing up her skates. The ice was a foot thick. It was pure white, with lines of cracks in it that had frozen over, and it ran smoothly into the snow on every side. There were two places where you could climb to the top of a little hill and run down through the snow, then launch yourself, sort of leaning back, and slide to the middle of the pond. Richie had gotten most of the way to the other side once.

Now Donna stood up and made twisty steps to the edge, then lifted her arms and one leg and slid onto the ice. It was not like that girl in Snow White and the Three Stooges , though, because Donna Fitzgerald was so fat.

The pond was tear-shaped, and the tip of the tear was long and curved. Donna headed in that direction. Richie could hear the sound of her skates scraping on the ice — it was that still today. Nedra said more snow was coming. Donna disappeared.

Michael had picked up a piece of a branch, rather thick, and was bending over the edge of the pond, smashing the end of the branch into the rim of the ice, breaking it into little pieces. Richie scrambled to the top of the hill and ran down as fast as he could, and when he passed Michael, he smacked his brother and knocked him down. He then slid a long ways without even trying. He could almost, he thought, have spread his arms and taken off. When he came back to the hill, Michael punched him in the stomach, and then they both ran down the hill and slid. Michael slid two feet farther than Richie. They slid four more times.

Richie said, “We should learn to skate.”

“Nedra said you can go to a rink in Englewood and take lessons.”

They both sighed. They had been kicked out of swimming lessons and out of tennis lessons for fighting. The tennis coach had even given them a second chance, but they had then been kicked out again when Michael smacked Richie with the rim of his racket, and not just the strings.

“Dad said you just put the skates on and skate. The faster you go, the less you fall down.”

Michael punched him in the stomach again, but he could hardly feel it with his heavy coat. He pulled Michael’s hat down over his eyes, and then pushed both of his shoulders until he sat in the snow, got around behind him, and pushed his face in the snow. Michael came up gasping, his face all red and icy, grabbed Richie’s mittens right off his hands, jumped to his feet, and ran. Richie laughed and fell backward, then lay on his back in the middle of the pond, looking up at the clouds; Michael returned and dropped the mittens on his face. Michael was laughing, too.

At the edge of the pond, a little hidden under a wooden box, were Donna Fitzgerald’s galoshes. They were large and black, with buckles. Inside them were some thick wool socks. They removed the socks, then filled the boots with snow and a few pebbles that were lying around, and some sticks. The socks were red. Michael picked them up and headed down to the tear-shaped part of the pond, where the water came in. Donna was practicing spinning around or something, and he ran past her, waving her socks, to where the ice was pretty thin. He got down on his knees. When he started soaking her socks in the cold water, she shouted, “Hey, you little brat!” and skated at him as fast as she could. He stepped gingerly toward the even thinner ice and stood there, waving the socks.

She got closer and closer, and then she went right through the ice. Michael shouted, “Fatso, fatso, fatso!” and ran past her, throwing the wet socks at her. He turned around once and saw that she had dropped into the pond up to her thighs. She started screaming and waving her arms. Michael kept running.

Michael passed Richie and said, “Come on, let’s go home,” and Richie followed him. He did not stop or turn around to look at Donna. They came to the edge of the pond, ran up the hill, got out to the road, and ran home. When they got there, Nedra was making a meatloaf. She said that Mommy and Daddy were going out for dinner, and they would be eating early. Michael followed Richie into his room and said, “There are two of us and one of her, and if you ever say that we were even at the pond, I will break your arm.”

“What did you do to her?”

“I think I killed her.”

Richie didn’t answer, and Michael went back into his own room.

Richie thought it was interesting, a few days later, to discover that Donna was fine and Michael hadn’t killed her. Life wasn’t like in the movies, then.

—

ARTHUR HAD ALREADY ACCEPTED the Grumman job, and Lillian had gone around Bethpage and a few other towns on Long Island with Andy, and Andy had helped her put a bid on a house — much smaller than the one they had in McLean, but big enough. Tim had persuaded her to let him stay with the Sloans for the rest of the school year, and Dean had found a hockey team not far from Bethpage that looked pretty good. Debbie wasn’t saying anything, and all Tina wanted to know was whether she would have a bigger room in the new house. The day before the Realtor came and went over the McLean place, she got a cleaning crew in and made it look as good as she could. The Realtor hummed here and smiled there and stared at the pool and admired the view from Arthur’s office, and all in all, Lillian decided that getting Arthur out of the agency was the less evil alternative.

Arthur now professed to be glad of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The only time he’d been really worried, he said, was when he was getting on the plane in Des Moines right after Claire’s wedding — the U-2s had photographed the equipment in Cuba, and Arthur, not having yet seen the photographs, had imagined such powerful missiles and warheads that when he saw the medium-range R-12s that were there, he was almost relieved. He said to Lillian, “So they kill us in Washington. They can’t get everyone with that crap.” And, yes, maybe it had been touch and go there for a moment — no one would ever know the truth about that, would they? Even the Kennedy brothers, even Khrushchev, even General LeMay probably would never know — all of their memories of those moments would be filtered through a mix of relief and regret. At least no irretrievable impulse or accident had intervened. And so, Arthur told her, in the end, it did everyone good to have to face up to the implications of ten years of posturing, and when Khrushchev decided that he wasn’t Stalin after all, and Kennedy decided that he wasn’t Churchill, the subsequent clearing of the air was worth the shock. Not to mention that Kennedy had decided to dismantle the Thor missiles in England and the Jupiters in Italy and Turkey — he had turned out to understand the Golden Rule, and LeMay had turned out to understand that Kennedy was indeed commander-in-chief.

But Arthur was drinking more — four times since Christmas, Lillian had had to put him to bed, and another time she had found him passed out on a lounge chair by the pool. And hadn’t the idea crossed her mind that he stopped at the lounge chair because he couldn’t make it to his real goal, the deep end, nine feet of prospective release from every argument, every uncertainty, every dilemma? How long had it been since he wanted to make love? Valentine’s Day he made a game of it, with chocolates and a new peignoir, but the old ardor, that combination of lust and paternal yearning, had been absent.