Black Ice (16 page)

I thought of the janitor of our building, cleaning up our messes. “If you dirty it up,” my mother said, “best you clean it yourself. Nobody in this world was put here to wipe anybody else’s behind.”

That is how I remember that night. I felt trapped, driven
outside. I was certain that I could get free of the noise in my head if only I could get outside where the cold black sky shimmered with familiar constellations.

But how certain can I be that on that particular night many years ago Sara actually did park her skis against the wall by the fridge? How certain that it was on that night and not one of a hundred other clear, cold New Hampshire nights that I went out to sit on the ice by myself? It was surely after my failed attempt to find relaxation in a pipe or to fit in with kids who played munchkins in the snow. I know that, because when I sat on the Lower School Pond, I thought of them—and of my shame at crashing through the iced-over creek bed, clumsy as a white man on an Indian trail. I know that it was before we went home, because when we returned in March the pond was thawing, and the ice was breaking up. And I know that the English exam was and is held near the end of examination week.

Four years later, when I first read Shakespeare’s sonnet 64 in a college English class, I attached that sonnet in my mind to Sara’s skis and to the night I have just described. In that class, listening to my professor’s enunciation, as crisp and as promising as a brand-new hardback, I also thought about my friend’s abortion, or her pregnancy, rather, and the teal-colored autumn dusk when she told me.

Those lines came back to me on St. Paul’s anniversary weekend in 1989, the weekend that marked my fifteenth reunion. They came to me after the annual parade, begun by the oldest alumnus riding a golf cart and ending with the current graduates,
shouting and laughing and riding on each other’s shoulders. (My husband dubbed it the seven ages of man.) The same sonnet came back to me the next day when I sat on the dais with the other trustees, who were older, whiter, and wealthier than I, and watched the black and Hispanic students in their suits and white dresses file past to receive their diplomas and toss a smile my way or a thumbs-up.

In this way I audit the layers of reminiscences, checking one against the other, mine against my schoolmates’. I trust the memory of my resentment of Sara’s slender legs, the joy of perfect equipoise on the balance beam, the milky taste of Ricky’s kisses. I trust the compassion a woman can feel for the girl she was. But it’s also true that my memory is a card shark, reshuffling the deck to hide what I fear to know, unable to keep from fingering the ace at the bottom of the deck even when I’m doing nothing more than playing Fish in the daylight with children.

Still, I believe that after I cleared my foodstuffs from the fridge, I headed for the Lower School Pond. Behind me were the woods where I’d been the night before. In front of me the two Chapels jutted out of the snow: vigilant, haunted, and holy.

I walked out onto ice so thick that during a skating party earlier that term we’d burned a bonfire on it. I slipped at first, but it came back to me to pull my weight up into my hips and balance it there, to relax my shoulders and knees. The ice seemed to get darker farther from the banks. I kept walking because this was, after all, a game of chicken, but also because I wanted to see where the ice would turn black.

I had heard about black ice in the fall. Masters spoke of it with reverence. It figured prominently in nostalgic talk about the old days, back when St. Paul’s was the first high school in
America to play ice hockey. The boys began their vigil in mid-November, hoping and praying for black ice, writing home about it.

The phenomenon they looked for is a clear, glittering ice that forms when it gets cold enough before the first snow to freeze the dark waters of the lakes. The surface acts like a prism to break winter sun into a brilliant spectrum of browns. Below, in the depths, frozen flora pose. Black ice is the smoothest naturally occurring ice there is, as if nature were condescending to art.

I went as far as the safety barrier, but not beyond. Tiny air pockets in the ice crackled under my boots. At the barrier I sat down on the ice, waiting for the cold dark to blow through and cleanse me. I wanted peace and clarity. I tried to think of Ricky, but other thoughts bubbled up. In a day we’d be boarding the buses, then the seven-hour train ride. Then I’d arrive at Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station, that welcoming palace with the bronze angel with two-story wings holding the railroad’s World War II dead in the form of a limp young man. Then home again to Yeadon, and the visits to my grandparents in New Jersey, and my family on Addison Street.

The stillness did not quiet me; I disturbed it. The woods quickened around me as surely as dolls and statues and trees had come alive in the dark when I was a child. Cold as I was, dark ice chilling me from below as the air seeped into my clothes, my mind conjured up the memory of two hot rooms in West Philadelphia that always smelled of liniment and sometimes smelled of gin. I began to tell myself Pap’s old stories. They began in the black night, too.

“Can you imagine how black? With not a light anywhere. So black and dark that women were sure to be home by nightfall, because they didn’t know what could be out there. And men, too.
Big
men rushed to get in out of the dark and in their
homes—where I should have been, but I had stayed and stayed and stayed.…

“But here, in this right hand, I carried a heavy stick, just in case. Cane grows up high, so I peered and peered trying to see, but there’s nothing to see in the narrow rows, in the dark, so I listened. I first knew it was there; I knew it; and then I heard it as a rustle.” He passed his fingers over the sheet and rubbed his dry feet together like the wings of a cricket. “Just a tiny rustle.

“And I stopped and turned in the darkness to face it. Then I saw it in the moonlight, crouched down low—a white dog, white-white, and I heard the growl in its throat. I felt the sweat in the small of my back. It moved toward me. I took that stick and threw! Hard as I could, I threw it.”

He heaved into the air, shaking the bed down to its squeaky springs. When the bed was still, he growled out, with a voice held over from his once broader and younger chest:

“And it screamed! It screamed like a woman, and the moment it screamed, I felt the pain, felt it as if that cudgel had come back and struck me there, on my shoulder.” Pap guided my hand over a knot of bone on his shoulder, like a fossil embedded in stone. “That was there the next morning when I woke up, and it’s been there ever since.”

I rubbed the knot each time to see if it had disappeared, or if the love in my hand might dissolve it.

“ ‘Poor Henry felt his blood run cold/At what before him stood—’ ”

“ ‘Yet like a man he did resolve,’ ” I answered him, “ ‘to do the best he could.’ ”

Pap nodded his approval at my recitation. Then he continued: “I learned,” he said, “that some things
thrive
in the dark. One man, Horace, I think his name was, Horace and his wife were getting ready for bed, when a knock came on the
door. The door was already shut for the night, and they had, like we all had, a heavy piece of wood that went across to lock it. So Horace called through the door, who was it? And a pitiful voice answered, the voice of a woman who had gotten caught out late and wondered if there was a man in the house to walk her home, just up the road, but she was sooooo frightened. So Horace told her to wait there, and he started to pull on his pants. And then, he was just lifting the bolt off the door, and his wife, it was, said to him, ‘Horace, you better take your gun.’

“And then they heard it screech: ‘Hah-haaaaaah!’ the thing outside the door screamed. ‘Your wife saved you!’

“Your wife saved you.” He repeated the sentence again in a wee, small voice and laughed to himself.

We never said exactly what it was that was outside the door, but I had no doubt that it was a witch, some vengeful, rapacious spirit. I imagined that the spirits were always women, like the one who slipped out of her skin at night and flew around in the darkness. She left her skin draped over a chair by the window, as easily as others leave their lingerie. When her husband realized what was happening, he went to an old woman in the village and asked how he could keep his wife home with him, where she belonged. The old woman told him to pretend to be asleep that night and wait until his wife was gone. Then he was to take salt and rub it on the inside of her skin. So he did. Just before the following dawn, when the sky began to lighten a little, but the moon still shone white and silver through the window, the husband heard the rustling and then a shriek of pain as the wife tried to slip back in. “Skin, skin,” she screamed, “ya na know me?”

I knew the stories so well that I daydreamed sometimes when he told them. I fell into a reverie in which I escaped from the city into a green wood, carrying with me my younger cousin and sister. It would be cold and clear in my fantasy, and the
children would have to walk hard to keep up. I’d carry them toward the end, one in the front, the other on my back, until we reached a cave I knew, where we’d shelter from the cold. I’d build a fire to warm us, and keep us there, safe and quiet and gentle. I’d never beat them, and we’d grow up together, simple and strong.

At other times, I’d remember Grammom and her soft, salty food: The
c’coo
she made, a tomato-base fish stew, cooked so long that you could crunch the bones, poured over a green porridge of cornmeal and okra. Her kitchen had felt safe like my cave, safe from the women who now ran the family.

Now that Grammom was dead, Pap seemed to have lost his link to the women downstairs. He was Man to them, the only steadfast, ever-present man in their lives, as much symbol as flesh. He fixed things still, blind as he was, feeling the rotten wood where a screw no longer caught and fingering through an old tool box for a longer screw, the proper screwdriver and putty. But the family had grown out of his stories. Their womanhood seemed to be a taking off from the world of men below: as surely as they worked and worried to get a man and then build a home and a bed in it with him, so too did they seem eager to fly away. I had no doubt that if they could have, my mother and her sisters and my grandmother would have left their skins draped like pantyhose over their unsatisfactory furniture and floated up above us all: the men who never failed to oppress them; the children who’d ruined their beautiful bodies; and the boxy little houses fit to bursting with the leftover smells of their cooking and the smoke from their cigarettes, curling up and hanging just above our heads like ambition.

Pap withdrew from their magic womanhood, even as he praised it. Marrying them off, he said, was like throwing “pearls before swine.” We said it to each other as we looked at the yellowing newspaper clippings of my twin aunts at twenty,
caught by an admiring photographer at some social function or another, in identical broad-brimmed hats and fur-trimmed jackets.

If they allowed him to withdraw, however, and to ossify into a family icon, certainly he himself had taught them how and why: “There’s a man whose daughter is standing at the top of some steps,” he began, “and the child’s name is Izzy. Now the father told the girl to jump down the steps, jump down to where he was. ‘Jump, Izzy, jump,’ he said. ‘Papa’s got you. Papa’ll catch you.’

“But she’s scared. ‘I’ll fall, Papa,’ she says.

“But he answers her, his voice so gentle, so strong: ‘Papa wouldn’t let you fall. Don’t be afraid. Come on, now, jump, Izzy, jump.’

“Finally the child gathers up her courage and jumps. She leaps toward her daddy’s arms—and her father, he steps aside. The child falls, of course. She falls down on that hard ground, and it hurts. She’s scraped herself, and it hurts. Her daddy helps her up and dries her tears, and she cries to him and cries and asks him, ‘Papa, why didn’t you catch me, Papa? Why did you let me fall? You said to jump, Papa, and I jumped.’

“And he says to her, ‘Listen to me, Izzy, and listen carefully. ‘Learn this this once and never forget: Trust no man.’ ”

We learned the lesson and whispered it into each other’s ears like poison. “Jump, Izzy, jump,” we said when one of us fell short, and then we laughed the grim, hysterical laughter of caretakers whom no one took care of.

I remembered Izzy and fashioned for myself the perfect pose. That was it. That was what I’d been trying to remember these months at St. Paul’s School, the pose: I would be well-mannered, big-hearted, defiant, and, because a pose cannot resist great intimacy, at the center of all my posing, I would remain alone. I would trust no man.

• • •

I got up from where I sat, walked a little farther out onto the ice, and then circled round the pond and made my way to the bank. I was warm with exertion and reverie. Comforted by the old, familiar fears, I could go back again to face the new ones.

It did not occur to me that the ice I had been sitting on might not be the black ice I’d heard about. It wasn’t. Black ice is an act of nature as elusive as grace, and far more rare. I did not learn about either until much later.

W
hen I arrived home for spring break in March, no one else I knew in the Delaware Valley was on vacation. I felt as isolated in our home as a young housewife. I ate and slept and did housecleaning during the day. I also daydreamed, listened to the radio, and walked from room to room twirling my baton and smiling vacantly at familiar objects.

One day Mr. Hawley’s end-of-term letter arrived with my grades. I had failed calculus. It seemed to him that I “simply met a difficult course … and did not really recognize this.” He went on: “Thus, she did not try new methods of studying … such as extensive extra help. Mr. Shipman feels that she can pass calculus in the spring term if she takes some realistic steps in the studying of the course.”