The Sudden Weight of Snow (12 page)

Like anthropologists, we examined the items on the tables, looking first, then picking through the remains as though hoping to discover something. We dipped the crumbs of chips into the remnants of different sauces – red, yellow, green dips, all with a brownish hue – turning to each other for assessment.

“What do you think that was?”

We were interrupted by a balding man with a grey ponytail and beads around his neck. “Hey, you two been on the sleigh ride yet?” he asked. Despite his appearance, or possibly because of it, we knew he was one of the worst kind: the hippie version of the sportswriter at the arena.

We looked back at him as though we couldn’t have been more bored. “No, we haven’t.”

“Oh, you have to go on a ride. They’re just about to take another one out. The moon is almost full, it’s solstice, the air is clear. Oh man, I’m telling you, it’s the most beautiful thing.” He said all this in a slow, drawn-out way, like pulling gum out of his mouth, seeing how far it would stretch.

“Are you sure it’s the
most
beautiful thing?” Krista asked, narrowing her eyes and looking pointedly at him. I suppressed a laugh. For one moment, he looked as though someone had
given his ponytail a quick jerk, then he was back to a slow blinking, rhythmic nod.

“Well, if it’s the most beautiful thing, we’d better go then.” I pulled Krista past the man and we made a path to the door through a gauntlet of large sweaters, musky smells, hair. On the porch, people talked and smoked with the urgency that cold brought, hauled on joints then funnelled laughter out of their throats in tight bursts. We smoked anything anyone passed to us, bare hands stinging when we took off one glove to accommodate the tiny ends of joints. By the time the sleigh pulled up to the porch, the huge horses snorting out steam clouds of warm air and jingling with bells, I felt delighted with the entire evening. I even started thinking in clichés about being my mother’s daughter. Vera must have stood bundled on porches waiting for horse-drawn sleighs to pull her through fields of snow. She may have even sneaked a drag off someone’s cigarette, imagined the flame would warm her, unsubstantiated beliefs like that existing as they did back then.

The “sleigh” was a flatbed covered with hay, no ornately curved sides, no furs, no burly men with bodies like bears, teasing pipes to light and then dim with their lips. The group of us on the porch piled on, jousted our limbs against one another until we could find some place to sit still without being cramped. My foot met with an ankle and someone cried out. The man up front, reins in hand, turned and directed us to all sit with our backs toward the middle, feet drawn in so they wouldn’t catch when we went through gates. Told us to hold on, the ride would be bumpy. Nothing to hold on to but each other. Nothing keeping us on but our mass, our bodies a cohesive unit.
We were pulled along snowy, moon-lit fields as we sang Christmas carols and drank hot, spiced alcohol from the wine skins that were being passed around. I was high on both alcohol and marijuana by the end of the ride, cheeks flushed with fresh air. Happier in that moment than I was sure I’d ever been in my entire life.

We got off the sleigh much as we had got on, not as individual bodies but as some multilimbed and awkward thing, tripping over itself. I found myself on my ass in the snow, laughing. “Oh, Lord,” Krista announced. “You’re loaded.” I just laughed and fell back, started flailing my arms and legs into a snow angel. We were back in front of the building and I was lying on a skiff of snow on a gravel lot, my snow angel grinding pebbles into my back. Nick and I used to dare each other to fall into a snow angel without bending a limb, an experiment that had knocked the wind out of us both more than once. Krista tried to pull me up but I couldn’t stop laughing or get any control over my limbs, which felt heavy and fluid, and soon we were both on the ground in a heap. “Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up,” we chorused.

That’s how I met him. He and an older man came down from the porch and pulled Krista and me off the ground as though we truly needed help. The older man was behind me, his arms hooked under my armpits pulling me to my feet. When I was upright, he held me there for a moment, waiting, I presumed, until I gained balance. “What’s so funny, girls?” the older man asked from behind me. When he said that, I started again, laughing so hard I would’ve fallen if I wasn’t being held up.

“She’s just fucked up,” Krista explained, grinning. I saw the younger man behind her. As I tried to catch my breath I focused on his face. In that moment, that small window of rest in my laughter, his expression seemed to convey several things at once. I saw in his face amusement, sadness, and recognition, as though he was trying to place me, or wanted to say something but didn’t know how.

Krista and I struggled to gain some composure but, as soon as we saw our own expressions reflected in each other’s face, we spat out laughter again. It turned into steam around us. The older one let go of his hold on me and shifted so he could look at both of us. “Whew, I’d like to have a bit of whatever you two had,” he said.

“You probably can,” said Krista. “Whatever we had, we got it here.”

He held out his hand to one of us, then the other, to shake. “Thomas.” More of a statement than an introduction.

The younger one simply stared. I thought there might be something wrong with him. I cracked a grin and he beamed back. His eyes were huge. Even the crinkling of a smile didn’t diminish them. Dark hair fell in thick curls over his forehead. His body was lost under layers of clothes. “I’m Gabe,” he finally said but didn’t hold out his hand for us to shake. He was too close to our age to do that.

“There’s hot chocolate in the cookshack. You two want some?” Thomas asked.

“Oh, my God!” Krista exclaimed.

Thomas took a step back, laughing. “Whoa, Nellie. What?”

“Don’t mind her,” I said. “We would just
really
love some hot chocolate right now.” People who are used to smoking pot forget about how extreme it can be at first, how good the thought of chocolate can taste.

“Oh my God!” Krista repeated. “Why didn’t anyone tell us there was hot chocolate?”

It wasn’t like I read it would be. I didn’t feel Gabe’s presence like heat; I didn’t feel like I’d always known him. My legs did turn to water, but only because of the intoxicants. Nothing fluttering and small lodged in my chest. When I met him, what I did feel was my tongue, like a stone under a river current, rubbed smooth.

Peter and Anise have decided you should be home-schooled. They believe that the stratified, hierarchical socialization of children into one generic mass, distinguishable only by grades that reflect a limited range of abilities, can’t be healthy. You are disappointed even though they tell you again and again that you don’t want to be part of that kind of system. You’ve actually enjoyed school so far. Entering late in the second grade has been some kind of strange blessing, a buffer. Teachers make note of it and don’t expect as much, so when you do well – catch on to long division quickly, excel at spelling tests – they are pleased. You have become a testament to how well the system can work. You’ve adapted well and fit in, you know this from the comments on your report cards.

And you do fit in. You are in the sixth grade and have made it this far without getting the tar beaten out of you. You don’t consider yourself popular, or even well-liked, but you are tolerated in a kind and gentle way by both the girls and the boys. It isn’t like this for everyone. There are kids who are teased and bullied ceaselessly, and sometimes brutally. Marty Cruickshank has been kicked so many times since the first grade by boys and girls alike that he has dents in his shin bones. The sad thing is
that it is Marty, himself, who points this out, invites kids to run their hands down his almost hairless legs, feel the ridges. He has had his arms twisted around the tether ball pole, hands in the grip of two boys while others line up to slam his head into the pole with the ball, the chain catching in his hair. He has been teased with such fervour during a class presentation that, before the teacher could stop the taunting, Marty wet himself, a dark stain growing on his tan-coloured dress pants. Barbara Sanducci has been called Brabra since she developed at a startling rate in the fourth grade and it was revealed that she received bras in her stocking at Christmas. She has been stripped of those bras, forcibly, in the boys’ change room, and once gagged with one, hands tied behind her back with her own shirt. The janitor found her there and, they say, she wasn’t even crying. It is the girls who do things like this to her, call her Brabra. The boys take the “duc” in her last name and call her “the Douche.”

You are not one of these kids, and while you feel sorry for them, your own feeling of relief overrides this. You don’t do anything terrible to the Martys and the Douches – no one would expect you to – but you are vigilant in ignoring them. Clearly, there is something wrong with kids like that and you don’t want anything to rub off on you. The other kids treat you well. You were given the nickname “Mouse” shortly after you arrived for, of course, being as quiet as one. Like other small cute things, you have become a kind of mascot for the kids in your grade. The boys pick you for teams in gym class. Not first or second, but often the third or fourth call someone will
say, “We’ll take the Mouse-Man” and it’s not because you are remarkably good at any sports, although you have passable skills in most of them. Girls have always tried to help you with your schoolwork even though you haven’t needed assistance since the first couple months of the second grade. They hover over your desk, smelling like root beer, bubble gum, dirt, until the teacher tells them to sit down. Recently, they’ve even approached you in the halls. They say, “Hi-i, Mou-ouse,” dragging out the monosyllables, twisting pieces of their hair, giggling. They’ll do this one after another sometimes, in quick succession, and then all gather at the end of the hall and giggle together, looking over their shoulders at you. Some of these girls are “going around” with boys in the seventh grade but those boys don’t mind. In fact, now even they acknowledge you. “Hey, Mouse-Man,” they’ll nod as if to concede some strange kinship developed through the sixth grade girls giggling at you.

All this has come to an end, though. You, apparently, do not want to be in such an unhealthy, unnatural environment. You are going to learn at home, at your own pace. Because you won’t have twenty-seven other kids to compete against, you will learn faster, retain more. In fact, Anise assures you that you will learn so quickly that you will only have to “do school” for half the day, the rest, you will be allowed to roam free. “Roam free!” Peter says. “Just like you did back at the farm, hey? You can explore the forest, do some fishing, help your old man in the shop.” Peter and Anise have invented some kind of 1950s American boyhood for you to enjoy. They have missed an
important element though. Other kids. There are more and more kids being home-schooled, they tell you, “We’ll hook up with them, you’ll meet some other home-schoolers soon.”

One day, you go with Anise to Berkeley to buy your first home-schooling books. The girls, as they’ve come to be called, as though they are one blond unit, stay in Arcana with a friend of Anise’s. Peter is running late on a contract so he can’t come. This is the first time that you can remember being alone with Anise. This is the first time that you realize that, although she looks like her, Anise is not like your mother, Susan. She sings, slides tapes in the cassette player, then out after a couple of songs. She talks a lot. Doesn’t ask you questions but talks on and on, interrupting herself with some lines from a song, then continuing. You nod. You realize that, although you used to ask Peter about Susan often – why she was so sad, when you would see her again – that you have forgotten to ask lately. You do the math. You haven’t seen your mother in more than four years. Suddenly you feel as though you should be home-schooled, as though you should be punished. Something has made you forget Susan, and you don’t know what. You watch as the redwood forest suddenly ends and you are driving through rolling farmland. You wonder how things can change so quickly like that, if it’s always been that way.

A
fter we regained our balance and our bearings, brushing the snow from our clothing, Krista and I went with Gabe and Thomas back into the building they called the cookshack. It was a large wood structure with a porch wrapping around two sides of it. When we went inside, it reminded me of a small community hall, two doors on either side of the wood stove in the back providing a glimpse of the kitchen. We were met with the smells of woodsmoke, of things spicy and sweet. Men and women alike wore layers of body-obscuring clothing and hugged each other more often than I was used to. People smiled at Krista and me as if they were oddly charmed to see us.

Thomas led us to a place where we could sit down, like we were elderly, or drunk, although, granted, we were the latter. He and Gabe navigated through the crowd, appeared again palming hot mugs. Thomas was handsome in a way that I thought would remind older women of being young. A way
that would remind most women of horseback riding, windswept days by the seaside. He looked as if he had spent his childhood on a farm, his young adulthood in earnest protest against social injustice, and his current middle age in a state of simple, healthy enjoyment of life. He looked as if he could be any age between thirty-five and fifty-five. Gabe couldn’t have been more than a couple years older than us. He was handsome in a strange, quiet way. I could still see the little boy in him, huge eyes blinking from behind strands of dark hair. He wasn’t boyish, though. When he looked at me, it was as though there were two expressions at odds with each other. His eyes seemed to be struggling to recognize me or to convey something important, while his mouth steeled him against words. It was a look that I would get used to.

It was nearly eleven-thirty and the cookshack appeared to be in a state of transition. People who had probably just come out for the craft fair and the potluck were beginning to leave, babies on hips, toddlers hanging on pant legs bemoaning their fate – stuck at an adult party too late, believing with surprising conviction that they were not tired. Other people were coming in – people with guitars and bongo drums, one with a stand-up bass. People with bottles of wine, cases of beer, and pouches of tobacco were looking around expectantly, wondering if they had missed anything yet. And dogs everywhere, lolling near the wood stove, sucking up bits of food from under the tables, burying their snouts in people’s crotches, or simply finding someone, looking up at them expectantly, tail in a slow, hopeful wag. Everything seemed slightly hazy and slow-moving, as though the smoke in the room were water. I narrowed my gaze
and saw Gabe’s hand around his cup, his leg against mine, the wooden bench on which we were sitting. The floor beneath us was rough-hewn. That was what I said to myself,
rough-hewn
, liking the sound of it.