by Tom Perrotta
This was it, what he had dreamed of. The smell of wood smoke, the icy packed snow under his feet, the broad white face of the mountain. He buckled up, snapped boots onto skis, moved back and forth in front of the hut, picking up each ski and slapping it down on the snow as if leg and ski were one thing; he was born to wear these things. Last year in Minnesota, he and Nate and Cousin Jenna took a ski lesson. He remembered everything. Schuss. To ski straight down the mountain.
When Nate and their mother emerged at last, Dylan pushed off with his poles, knees bent as the instructor had said, to impress upon anyone who was looking the pointlessness of more instruction. His mother skied toward him, steady and quick. He admired that.
Then he saw what she had under her arm. “No way,” he said.
“Oh yes.”
It was a helmet, clunky and moronic, like the top of a trashcan. “You aren’t wearing one.”
“Check out your big brother.”
He didn’t have to look. “He’s a nerd!” Trouble started in her face but he went on, “They aren’t wearing helmets.” She knew who he meant.
“They could break their necks. Wind up in a wheelchair. In a hospital bed, being fed through a tube.”
“Mom,” said Nate, “you’re overdoing it.”
Dylan felt he’d won the argument, with Nate’s help, but in his mother’s court of law, being right counted for nothing. Her ski came down upon the front of his skis, and he was glued in place while she situated the helmet and snapped it under his chin with a merry grin on her face. He was boxed in, cut off from the possibilities that so recently had stretched before him. No wind in his ears, and this protrusion, this shelf, to peer out from under. He thought of a movie (all of a sudden!) wherein the hero’s entire head, front and back, was padlocked inside an iron mask, with slits for the eyes and mouth. He tried to release the helmet’s clasp, couldn’t manipulate the tiny plastic pieces, and in the consolidating organ of his psyche, something came loose. It was a small glitch in the system, activated when an impulse of his was checked, not invariably but once in a while. A wild dog that lived inside him had yanked free of its chain.
As if for his life, he fought the thing on his head. The strap was tight, his hands felt dead inside his fat-fingered gloves, he couldn’t even feel the buckle. The poles on their wrist straps swung against his legs as if they had it in for him: Dylan against Things. With a heave of strength and will, he pulled off his gloves with his teeth, he flung off his poles. “Stupid buckle!” People cast glances. His mother shouted, “Dylan, get hold of yourself,” but she seemed frightened of him, and then he too was frightened. To restore himself, he tried to turn around, turn his back on her. His skis crossed, he teetered and fell, legs entwined, at the mercy of his uncontrollable skis, and all he could do was roll onto his back, skis flailing like the broken blades of a helicopter or the legs of some mutant insect. He squeezed back tears of shame.
Then Nate was leaning over him. “Yo. Little bro.” The words went by without touching him but Nate’s eyes found him. Nate clicked their helmets together. “Chill, man?”
His mother on one side, Nate on the other, Dylan was raised to his feet. “I ought to knock your two heads together,” she said, reclaiming maternal control of a wry, amused sort. “Now listen to me. On the slopes I want us all to stay together. Promise, wild man?”
For a while it was as if a fever had passed. They lined up at the rope tow like ducklings, Mom in front, and let the thick rope run through their gloved hands, then one-two-three, squeeze—yank—they were moving. Last year Dylan’s skis kept sliding out of the ruts, and several times he fell, and they had to stop the rope and wait for him to take his place again, but he was good now. At the turnstile he let go just a little late and managed to stay upright, so pleased with his mastery that he didn’t mind that the tow ended barely a third of the way up the mountain or that he remained last in the family line. Stoic in the shade of his helmet, he followed the other two down the gentle slope, veering slowly from side to side as they did, bending forward just a little to decrease wind resistance. The next time down, he straightened his skis, tucked his useless poles under his arms, and swiftly reached the base of the hill. There he raised his poles in a victory salute, for his mother and brother still midslope, traversing at snail speed, skis clumsily splayed. Nate fell; Dylan turned away in shame, thinking of yesterday at Ethan’s. They were wrestling, and it was starting to be fun, when Ethan went limp and rolled out from under him: it was wrong when the enemy didn’t even try. You’re a pussy, he said to Ethan, which is exactly what the dude was and is—for quitting and for being a liar, because he had fought (he swore!) fair; there was no reason for Ethan’s mother to send him home.
When the other two reached the bottom—finally!—his mother showed him the snowplow, as if he’d forgotten it. “I was racing,” he started to say, then comprehension dawned. Again he was competing with nobody. “At least I didn’t fall,” he muttered.
“I fell on purpose,” Nate said mildly. “To slow myself down.”
If you went any slower, you’d’ve gone backward, Dylan said to himself but not to Nate. He fought his frustration, tilting his face up to the wind as he grasped the tow rope, snowplowing down the wide, gentle slope, back and forth, back and forth, like it didn’t matter how fast he went or even where.
During lunch their mother commended Dylan’s self-control. “You showed real maturity,” she said. “You deserve a medal,” Nate said, raising an elbow to ward off Dylan’s punch. Nate didn’t want to eat, though their mother coaxed him. Dylan ate his burger and most of Nate’s. Snow was falling again, slanting at the picture window.
Outside the restaurant it looked like time had passed faster than inside. The swarm of skiers had thinned, though it might just be the blowing snow, into which people took a step and disappeared. It was hard to see where the tow ended, and farther up the slope, the mountain melded with the dirty white sky. Flakes were small and almost hard against his face. Fearful of being steered back to the car, Dylan grabbed his skis and poles and ran toward the tow rope. He was almost there when Nate passed him on skis, quick and strong as he had been last year. Nate swiveled, stopping dead in front of him, in a spray of stinging snow. The move looked classy. Dylan felt as always the impulse to best him. He stomped back into his bindings, stared his brother down; he was almost Nate’s height. Then, maybe it was the mist thickening around them, snow settling on their twin helmets, or maybe he finally saw how futile it was to contest the advantages of age, but suddenly Nate’s skills no longer agitated him. It was like losing a heavy book from his backpack. Of course Nate had skills. “Now we’ll do a real hill,” he said to Nate. “Right?”
Their mother approached. Dylan urged his brother toward the trails to their left, where a chairlift climbed the mountain and vanished into white. Beyond it were other lifts and trails that promised keener pleasures. “We’re going there, Nate and me,” he informed their mother, with a nod toward the white wilderness. “Want to come?”
She spoke drily. “I’m no expert. Are you?”
“It’s just advanced.”
“Just? Do you know how to parallel?”
“Yes!”
“In your dreams.”
He pulled his skis together, pressed his knees together, and hopped to one side like an Olympic skier, following up with a withering look at his mother, who would never get over her need to impede him.
“I wouldn’t mind us trying a long slope,” she said, “but we’re not going to be daredevils. Nate, how are you holding up?”
“He’s fine.”
“The man speaks,” said Nate.
She had a trail map and she spread it out and pointed to a trail in green that was called, embarrassingly, First Adventure. According to the key, green stood for beginner. Big Thunder, three trails over, was black for advanced. “Do you think we’re babies?” he said, but she wouldn’t budge. “Tell her, Nate,” he said, but Nate only grinned. He gave Nate a shove, Na
te shoved him back, and it was like always, Nate’s gloved hands against his hands, a stalemate, with Dylan suspecting he wasn’t fighting his hardest.
The First Adventure lift had benches like porch swings, a substantial improvement upon the rope tow. Dylan and his mother and brother stood side by side till the seat hit the back of their knees and swooped them up, quicker and higher than Dylan expected. He sat in the middle, and inside his helmet he had to turn all the way around to see, but all his thoughts, good and bad, blew away in the gusty wind. The vista kept widening. Behind them, smaller and smaller, the bunny skiers went down the baby hill, or was it babies down the bunny hill, lurching, falling like dolls. On both sides of the lift, silvery trails snaked up the mountain through pine woods, half hidden and glimmering. Involuntarily he kicked out with his skis. The bench started swinging; he crowed with the thrill of it. “Don’t do that!” said his mother. Bitch, he said, under his breath, almost dreamily. Heaven seemed close. And angels. Ahead, emptied of passengers, a bench clanked around the turnstile and started downward.
As soon as they reached the disembarking point, he slid down off the bench, landed squarely, and poled himself toward the ridge, where a right turn led to First Adventure and a left toward the more rigorous trails he had seen on the map, hidden in the blowing snow. He had plans. After the beginner trail, he would go right back up—no Mom, just him and Nate speeding down the silver slope as fast as thought. He opened his mouth to catch a few flakes while his heart thumped with the force of his imagining. Wind blew at him, front and back, but couldn’t get inside his parka. There was wind and squeaking, crunching snow and the creaking lift, and dimly audible human voices. They enclosed him, a thicket of well-meaning sounds.
Then under the rush of wind, he became aware that one of the layers of sound was gone. He was inclined to overlook it—hardly an absence, just a thinning out, a barely perceptible dilution of the forces around him. Besides, going back to check on something, retracing his steps for any reason, subverted the proper order of things. But the silence seeped into his mind like fumes, and after a minute or two he was poling back to the lift—where he found a scattering of people stalled in confusion, and above them, perversely halted, the benches of the lift swaying a little in the wind, and below, seated in the snow, his mother and brother. Nate leaned against her, his head on her shoulder, eyes closed, while she regarded the onlookers with a stiff smile. “He’ll be fine!” she kept saying. “He has to rest a few minutes.”
Dylan stood on the edge of the gathering, remembering talk between his parents at the kitchen table, with him outside the door, unable not to overhear: We have to keep it normal for them. As much as we possibly can. At which he had turned and fled, from everything beyond the bounds of his parents’ vision of normality for him and Nate, expanses he still had no wish to explore. He wanted to flee again, and he might have if his legs weren’t so spongy. Then his mother was beckoning. “He’s just tired, honey. It comes on quick sometimes. I think his count is low.”
He didn’t want to look at Nate, but it was hard not to. His helmet was off, their mother’s plaid scarf around his head and neck. He had no eyebrows. Was this normal? Nate opened his eyes and smiled apologetically. Dylan wanted to punch him.
He punched his mother’s shoulder. “Dylan, what’s wrong with you!” she said sharply, then softened her voice. The Ski Patrol would ride Nate down on their sleigh easy as pie, like lying in bed. It was almost time to go anyway. She seemed to be talking to herself, though her words were directed at him. Could he ski down and meet them by that rental place? Go in, take off his equipment, and return it? He could do that by himself, couldn’t he?
“Of course! Do you think I’m retarded?”
He moved slowly, in no willed direction, just out of his mother’s sight, while snow blew at her and Nate, and people’s hats and hoods and helmets and the boughs of evergreens. The lift creaked and started moving again, though many chairs were empty. The few people getting off barely paused to look around before pushing off toward their chosen slopes. The wind seemed to have intentions that weren’t kind. The word evil came to his mind but he didn’t know what to do with it.
The sky had darkened toward the gray of night when the red parka appeared on high, and the girl, Lindsey, solitary on the long bench and helmetless, hatless. She slid down onto the icy packed snow like she didn’t even have to think about it, her hair bouncing behind her. For a moment their eyes met; she grinned. Then, passing, she thrust a pole in his direction as if spearing a fish, and clicked open the binding of his left ski, crowing as she flitted by.
For a moment he flailed for balance. His freed ski was sliding off, though it remained clipped to his boot by a short cord. He captured it with the sole of his boot. If she were a boy, he’d have been enraged—he’d have felt engorged with impotent hatred. But now, hearing in his mind the sound of her hilarity, he simply snapped his boot back into place and poled himself toward where she had vanished. Snow blew inside his helmet and down his neck unprotected by a scarf, but he hardly felt it, passing the turn-offs to two or three unmarked trails (there were no signs, or else the signs were covered in snow) till he arrived at the top of a hill so steep he couldn’t see where it went. A shiver climbed the knobs of his spine. He had dreamed this, riding a brakeless bike down a blind hill, trying to wake before the crash while simultaneously willing himself back inside the dream, into the pure speed of the drop. Digging his poles into the feathery new snow, he crept toward the edge. He felt Lindsey here and everywhere, her skier’s soul joined with his, two experts on unworthy slopes.
Then he was moving, slowly at first, then faster than he had ever gone without the shell of a vehicle around him, bent over like skiers on TV twisting through the bendy yellow flags, except that he was going straight down, past skiers traversing—no time to see faces—faster than images could be processed, faster at last than his mind could think. This was schussing. This was riding the wind. He wondered for a second if he should try to slow down. A voice said in his ear, Make yourself fall! But falling was what Ethan would do. Falling was Nate. Dylan leaned forward into the whoosh of his skis, the wind of his descent, as if thereby he would rise into the air like a kite.
It was his last thought before he hit. There was a crack, a flash of red. He flew backward in slow time, like the moment on Nate’s sled, in the circle of his brother’s arms, when, swerving around another sled, he saw a tree looming before them, and he had all the time in the world to think—Turn, Nate! Swerve!—and to picture the aftermath of breakage and pain, though there was no time to say it aloud. Nate had miraculously managed to turn them; they’d missed the tree.
When Dylan opens his eyes, he is sprawled in deep snow. The world returns bit by bit. He tips his head back, takes a cautious sip of air. There are things to do and things he mustn’t do, so it seems. He raises his head then sets it down. His head, inconceivably, is lower than his feet. He’s on his back, tries to turn; pain makes him gasp and the gasp hurts the top of his belly. From somewhere comes an outraged, teary female voice: “I’ll kill him!” A chunk of time seems gone from his brain.
Then people are bending over him as they had bent over Nate.
“It’s a kid. Oh my.”
“Trying to set a record, are you?”
“Kids his age don’t belong here.”
“Little cocksucker. I’d like to wallop him!”
“Don’t move, kiddo. He shouldn’t move, should he? Are you okay?”
“Hey, bomber, what’s up? Can you move your legs?”
“Let him lie still. Wait for Ski Patrol.”
“I’m fine,” he cries, raising his arms to prove it.
Someone taps his helmet. “Good thing you had this on. Protect those brain cells.”
Was he being insulted? “Just help me up!” he cries.
While people are unhooking his skis, unlooping the pole straps from around his wrists, he wonders what he hit. If it was a person, and that person was Lindsey,
he didn’t want to know. Someone takes one of his arms, someone else the other; they pull him upright. Then he tries to stand, and the pain is so vast and deep, he has to scream.
That night in the hospital where Nate was being transfused, Dylan lay on an examining table while the doctor wound his leg in sticky white gauze from his knee to the bottom of his foot. It was cool at first then started heating up. He was lucky, the doctor said. It was a greenstick fracture. He should keep it elevated when possible. He had broken some ribs too, but they would heal on their own, quickly, because he was young. In six weeks after moderate physical therapy he’d be back on the slopes.
His mother stood on the other side of the table, and he looked up at her to see how he was supposed to take the news. She had tears in her eyes. He felt his own tears welling, though with his pain medication he was so relaxed he could barely imagine pain. “Mom,” he said tenderly, “you don’t have to cry!”
“He was down to nine,” she said. “It’s a wonder he could keep his head up.”
The doctor signed a sheet of paper and left. They sat, Dylan on the table, his mother in a plastic chair in a tiny, bright, curtained-off room in the ER, where they were obliged to stay till a wheelchair came to roll him out to the car, where his father was waiting. His crutches stood in a corner; he wanted to try them but not enough to say anything. Footsteps passed but didn’t enter. He was alone with his mother, which he liked though he’d never have admitted it. He liked the word greenstick. He didn’t want to know what nine meant.
