Parachutes and Kisses (33 page)

The builder—a spacy young fellow who had become a friend of Isadora‘s—had built the driveway with maximum perversity. It went down from Serpentine Hill Road at a sixty-degree angle, took a hairpin turn (which was badly drained and therefore always iced over), and then went up a little rise, right after whatever car you were driving had already gone into a skid. It was the property's most eccentric and impossible feature. The Mercedes—with its wide wheelbase and skiddy rear wheels—often could not make it up the driveway in winter. And now that Josh had gone off and taken both the Land Cruiser and the Datsun, Isadora had to buy a new front-wheel-drive car for the nanny, simply to get Amanda back and forth to nursery school. But sometimes the snow was so deep and the plow so late in coming that even the new Saab could not get up the road. On such mornings, Isadora would just sit dismally staring out her window, waiting for the plow to come, and hoping that the furnace did not go again. There were so many fuel deliveries that winter that sludge on the bottom of the oil tank was always being stirred up to foul the works, and the house would suddenly go cold as one of those haunted houses in the sort of horror novel Isadora wished she could write. (Oh,
anything
would be better than the Papa novel at this point, and anything would be better than having to digest and transform her own life before she could get on with the next book.)

For a New York girl, whose habitual response to domestic fuck up was to phone the super, Isadora got amazingly good at finding the reset button on the furnace. She would throw on her ski parka over her jeans, climb into moon boots and stomp out through the snow, cram herself through the tiny Alice-in-Wonderland door that led to the crawl space under her house (there was no basement—for the house was built on rock ledge), and grope around in the darkness for the reset button. When she found it, it meant far more to her than just that her furnace would run again. It meant that she could live without a man, that Josh's departure had not done her in, that she could set an example to her daughter about how to be—that contradiction in terms—“a free woman.” For that was freedom, wasn't it?—findingthe reset button on the furnace? Now, if she could only trade in the Mercedes for a jeep with a snowplow attached, and learn to plow her own driveway, she would
really
be a free woman! Until that time came, she would pick her men, she decided, for their skill in plowing and sanding driveways and in chopping wood, but how much better it would all be if she could learn to operate her
own
plow!

She had a fantasy of herself giving up men altogether and becoming one of those stalwart Connecticut ladies (in boots from L.L. Bean) who raises dogs, plows her own property, fixes her own boiler, and lives happily without a resident male (or even a nonresident male). Could this be what Isadora's odyssey had in store? Well, not yet—but perhaps
one
day. Would it finally be a relief to be free from the
Sturm und Drang
of relationships and just live happily alone? Perhaps. For the first time in her life, Isadora saw the appeal of such solitude.

What a sense of self-reliance she had when the furnace kicked over and started to run again! If she remembered this winter for nothing else, it would be for the discovery that she could make it in the woods alone.

Still, Kevin came up on weekends to temper the loneliness. And there were a variety of other swains. None of them meant much to Isadora compared to Kevin, but Isadora had enough reservations about Kevin (partly because he had sired such a monster and partly because Kevin had another girl friend whom he juggled with Isadora) that she didn't feel the impulse to give herself to him totally. This was fine with him, since the one thing Kevin feared most in life was making some sort of commitment. Kevin sometimes reminded Isadora of that joke about the guy in the singles bar of whom a pretty young woman asks “What time is it?” “I'm not ready to make a commitment yet,” he replies.

As Christmas drew ever nearer, Isadora wondered whether she and Mandy might have to spend the holiday alone. Perhaps Kevin's other girl friend had seniority over holidays. Isadora was afraid to ask. But the thought of a solitary Christmas panicked her, so a few days before the holiday, she called up all the friends and family she knew who might be alone that year and invited them to a Christmas Open House. Mandy was hers that Christmas; next year she would be Josh's (lawyers had already begun dickering over a separation agreement, and Mandy's life was being divvied up). Josh planned to go to Las Vegas with Ms. Emanon—and unfortunately, he chose to take his leave a week or so before Christmas, during the worst blizzard yet.

The power was gone, the furnace had blown, and the telephones were ringing erratically (threatening imminent loss of communication with the outside world) on that dark and foreboding night in December when Josh came to say goodbye to Mandy.

It was about five in the evening, but already dark as midnight. Nurse Librium was giving Mandy a bath by lantern light, making use of the tub of water she had run before the power went (lest the water pump not work for the next day or so). Isadora was dashing around madly, lighting candles, finding lantern batteries, filling pots with water, trying to phone the fuel-oil service line before the phones went dead (all the things you do in Connecticut during a blizzard), and suddenly Josh drives down the snowy driveway in the Land Cruiser, stomps to the door, and rings the bell.

The house is spooky by candlelight, it almost seems haunted. Candles flicker in the living room and dining room. Fires are lit in all the fireplaces, but they seem oddly lonely in the darkness and silence. Seemingly oblivious of the emergency situation around them, Josh walks into the house and demands to see Mandy.

“She's upstairs, having a bath,” says Isadora.

Josh takes off his red ski cap, his green down parka (which Isadora had bought for him the year before), gives not so much as a nod to Isadora, and clumps upstairs to Mandy's bathroom.

“Daddy!” she cries in ecstasy, as he enters her lantern-lit bathroom.

Daddy! Isadora wants to scream. Where are all the daddies who promised to take care of us if we were only good girls and always,
always
put them before our own self-esteem? Nowhere to be found. Daddy is dead—or else in hibernation—like God. It's the Mother Goddess who will answer our prayers now—or no one.

Josh spends not more than ten minutes with Mandy, comes back downstairs, and starts putting on his parka again.

Isadora has not been able to reach the furnace people or the snow-plow people or
anyone.
The phones are still ringing on and off in that way they do in Connecticut before they conk out altogether. She is getting hysterical.

“Josh,” she says, “isn't there a number where I can reach you in case of an emergency?”

Very funny. Doesn't she realize that this is
already
an emergency ? What on earth would she do if the kid had an accident and had to be rushed to the emergency room? She couldn't even get up the driveway.

“I don't want you to bother me on vacation,” Josh says coldly.

“But what about Amanda? What if there's an emergency with Amanda?”

“There won't be—but if there is, you can call my parents—or my sister. They can reach me.”

“But what am I going to do? How can I get out of here if there's an accident or anything?”

“It's not my problem, Isadora,” he says, “I told you we were no longer a couple.”

“You bastard!” Isadora spits out. “You don't support your kid. You don't even leave phone numbers. I don't have a word low enough to describe what I think of you!”

“I know what you think of me,” says Josh. “And I don't care.”

“Can't I at least borrow the Land Cruiser? You'll hardly need it in Las Vegas!”

“I'm lending it to Ishmael's mother,” Josh said, cruelly. “She needs it more than you do.”

“Get out of here, you fucking bastard!” Isadora screams, and she flings out one arm to strike him, but he dodges her, taking off into the blizzard and leaving his house, his child, his wife, again, again, again. Were they doomed to repeat that scene for all eternity.

Isadora lets out a scream that could have pierced hell itself. Then she goes to the fridge, fixes herself a very stiff vodka-and-grapefruit-juice, and returns to her frantic telephoning.

 

Fortunately, the power was restored before long, and the phones never blew, but the snowplow did not come for two days, and during that snowbound time, Isadora had plenty of hours to reflect on Josh's treatment of her. He needed so to punish her, he'd even subject the person he loved most in the world—Mandy —to discomfort, if not outright danger. Why? It made no sense at all. Was the need for vengeance that strong, or was he simply oblivious of the hurt he inflicted on Mandy and Isadora?

“I never want to depend on him for anything again,” Isadora told Kevin on the phone later, when they commiserated about Josh's ungentlemanly departure. “If he calms down and wants to be a human being again—great. I hope so for Mandy's sake. But I never want to count on him for anything. Never. It just hurts too much when I get kicked in the teeth.”

This was a turning point of sorts. Up until then, Isadora was playing the Penelope game, waiting for her errant Odysseus to come home. Although she led her life as if she were on her own, there was a part of her that never really embraced independence. She would learn to reset her own furnace, haul her own wood, plow her own driveway—but after that, Josh would come home and kiss her on the forehead for being so independent. Daddy would reward her after all—reward her for her self-reliance.

It was a paradox, wasn't it? The more she took pride in her independence, the more she had fantasies of his applauding her for it. She knew this was inconsistent and absurd. She should love her independence for its own sweet self, enjoy it because it gave her choices, not because it would please Josh—who might or might not ever come home. But she had not quite reached that point in her self-transformation. Would she ever? She wanted to come to that lovely moment of inner-directedness where she delighted in her strength without wondering whether a male (or female) audience would be there to give her a standing ovation for it. She had won all the other battles most women never win—her own professsion, her own money, her own autonomy from both father and husband. But in her heart, she still had Daddy installed as censor, judge, arbiter of her achievements. And if she, with all her freedom, was so unfree, what did that bode for other women?

It snowed, it snowed, it snowed. The snow drifted over the hot tub and filled the walkways and the driveway. The snow swirled mistily in the houselights that beamed out into the hemlock branches, and the snow outlined Mandy's wooden climbing frame and the branches of the vulnerable little fruit trees that Josh and Isadora had planted during their last spring together—most of which had died. The sky was pink with snow, almost a fleshy pink, not at all the clear white of a blizzard in a paperweight.

After Mandy was safely tucked off to bed, and Nurse Librium had retired to her rerun heaven, Isadora pulled on her moon boots and her parka and walked out onto the deck to survey the blizzard. The valley below her house was virtually obscured by the swirling snow, but each of the multitudinous hemlock tops she gazed down upon endured its own diminutive blizzard. Every treetop was like a little universe in which snow swirled, then caught on the needles and was stopped in midflight. What an amazing substance snow was! It had the power to suggest eternity and mortality at the same time. Its crystals celebrated the amazingly protean powers of creation, but its evanescence reflected the fragility of that creation. And here we all were, poised on the nuclear brink, as Isadora was poised over her own invisible Connecticut Valley. After the holocaust, there would be no more snowflakes, no more hemlocks, no more beautiful dawn-cheeked babies with purplish lids. How silly and unimportant her divorce from Josh Ace was in the light of that possible nuclear extinction. How minor it was even in the light of her own brief odyssey on the planet—which was as brief in its way as the life of a snow-flake.

The redwood lounge chairs had never been put away in the garage that fall (in times of crisis one forgets such autumn rituals), and a thick layer of snow had formed on each one, as if a snowy overstuffed cushion had been tailored to each chaise. The contours of the snow cushions were almost cloudtike—making this deck seem a foretaste of heaven with Isadora poised on a heavenly balcony above the mortal coil.

The snow had trapped her in her own house, in her own thoughts, yet it had also, oddly, released her. She lay down on one of the snowy chaises, looked up into the swirling pink sky, and opened her mouth to receive the snow crystals as a sacrament. Lines from her favorite story by Joyce came back to her, but they came back to her only in snatches. Something “swooned” as the snow kept “falling faintly on through the universe ... over all the living and all the dead.”

Drat. Why couldn't she remember the whole quote? She had taught “The Dead” many times during her years as a college English instructor, and the story had never failed to amaze her with its richness. She could quote other beloved works by heart—great chunks of prose and poetry—but this one somehow eluded her.

Did the snow swoon or did someone's soul? Did the snow cover Ireland or the whole universe? She flipped through her mind as if it were a book whose pages she was turning. She did not want to get up, go inside, and look up the quote, but she knew she would have to before long. Remembering the Joyce quote made her suddenly taste the blood of wanting to write again. That was what Josh had robbed her of more than anything—the lust to write—which had always been her center, her soul.