“Your Highness!” the partner shouted. He put his hat on and left the premises after her in a hurry.
“Oh my god maybe,” Andy said. “It couldn’t be but maybe.”
“The Snow Queen?” Andrea said, so loudly that the carafe wobbled. “The Snow Queen the Snow Queen?”
But now the door had shut, and through the rain and the paintings on the windows they stared. Andrea stared and Andy stared, everyone stared, except the bickering couple so busy wading through the words they wished they could skip that they only had a dim picture of some old woman shouting and leaving, and the cook in his magnificent disinterest, mapping out the world on the griddle where he worked, secure in the very wrong knowledge that he had seen everything before. Nobody had seen this thing, as Gladys faced this man in a hat, and howled something inaudible as he froze in his steps, and finally beheld her.
“Do you think?” Andy said, and put down the coffee.
“That everything in the entire world,” Andrea said, “that anyone ever told us, is wrong?” and maybe this is why Mike stared the hardest. It is bad news when the world tells you the bad news that you are wrong, unless you are ten and this happens every five minutes and the only difficulty is that adults spend most of their time pretending nothing much has gone amiss. Mike stared hardest as Gladys raised her shawl again and began the thing no one had seen before.
It was not the rain. It was not the wine. It was not the painted window, which was not blocking the view. Gladys howled and from the folds of her shawl came a spiral something. It was made of flurries, it looked like, white and gray in the diminished light. The spiral spun out wider, wider until it hit the detective’s partner and covered him instantly with what had to be snow. It hurt. It hurt him. He was covered and could not move and then the Snow Queen stepped back and was no longer framed in the window.
“What was that, the hell?” Andy said. “What was that outside my diner?”
The detective turned out to be standing flat against the far wall. “That was the Cone of Frost,” he said. “I never thought I’d see that in my whole damn life.”
Nobody realized that Mike was out the door, although Andrea was staring after him and hoping it was the wine, all she saw. She could not move from her place, this woman who had been drinking, and just so you have some background, everyone in this story is sad. Let’s get it straight: everyone here has lost a child, a burden given to so many characters as they walk through a small pinch of paper with the dignified literary weight of grief. It’s a gratuitous punch in the stomach, is what it feels like. When Andy learned the news of the car which had not just spun but flipped over on the ice, and so the seat belts, the car-seat, the special traction of the tires had not been nearly enough to save him, he sank to the mat like a prizefighter and howled on the floor until his friends pulled him up. Such good friends. With Andrea the child died in the crib, downed suddenly like a cheap drink. Mike’s little brother died when he fell down the stairs in just the right way and the ambulance arrived too late on a cold, cold night, and his father hardly spoke or opened the mail ever again. The bickering couple would never know their babies, and the frozen partner on the sidewalk could still hear, even through the ice, those last wet and desperate coughs of his tiny daughter as she flailed in the strong hands of her sobbing mother who ran away as soon as it was done, and even the cook did not know that even at this sad moment his girlfriend could not stop screaming from what she heard in that numb whitewalled clinic, and the detective was buttoning his coat and still thinking of himself as the father of a little figure-skating girl who was no good at it. She would stumble around the ice until her ankles made her cry, all the while imagining the perfect 8’s, the twirls and flurries of grace, and this detective would stand and imagine it too on the sidelines, as he threw down money for the waffles and buttoned his coat to leave. In the diner these people had frozen in their tracks from being treated so cruelly. Not only their ankles ached, but they were in pain in their feet, and in their mouths with each bite of lousy food, and in their ears. The pop songs they heard slayed them every time. Some radio would only have to play, for old time’s sake, that song that goes “yes yes yes, oh baby yes,” and everyone in the diner would be in tears. They could not love anymore, they thought, just drink and pour coffee and track people down in the rain. They were living frigidly, as if in a Cone of Frost. It was apparently necessary for their babies to abandon them so they could see what I mean, if you know what I mean. But couldn’t they get something back, or something else? Love—is this something we can learn to do again, and if so, when will that time arrive, even on a bad day? When do you know when something is becoming something that changes you? That’s what Andrea was thinking of, and a Ramos Gin Fizz, as she watched the snowcapped figure of the detective’s partner topple to the sidewalk and the swift shadow of Mike dodge down the street. When do you learn that the world, like any diner worth its salt, is open twenty-four hours a day?
Now. Mike ran after her through the drips and drabs of snow on the ground. It never snowed in San Francisco. Never never never. Okay, once when I was in kindergarten, and I think some other times, but it doesn’t stick. This is love, an impossible thing that will change your frigid life, and Mike believed it was happening and ran after her into the night. But by the time the detective got outside there was nothing he could see, and so he went back inside.
“Which way did she go?” he said, and remembered his hat. “Which way did the Snow Queen go?”
“I don’t know,” Andy said. “If I were you I wouldn’t go out there and I wouldn’t want to know. Not you.”
“I can’t believe what I saw,” Andrea said. “The therapy I’ll need or something. Or, I should sober up, and drive a cab for a living now. You meet people in a cab. A miracle could happen and I would see the Snow Queen again.”
The detective peered out of the painted window and banged his head on the glass, hard. It rattled and rattled people.
“Don’t do that!” cried the cook. “Watch what you’re doing! Pay attention to what’s going on!”
“She’s gone southside,” the detective moaned. “I don’t know which direction to go,” and this is love, too. If you miss your Snow Queen you might not appear in the love story anymore. “Men grow cold as girls grow old,” a song says. “Men grow cold as girls grow old, and we all lose our charms in the end.” This is a love story, which must be grabbed in time. Mike knew it, and he ran in the rain on the snow. He had been wearing a sweatshirt this whole time and it was getting heavy and wet. He had the chills as he chased after her, and that’s part of love, too. You get the chills when you get close to her, and you run until you slip in a puddle, “Ouch,” and the Snow Queen turns around.
“Oh dear,” she said. “You’re the boy from the diner and you slipped in a puddle. You’ll catch cold. You’d better come inside.”
“Okay,” Mike said, and she pulled him to his feet. “I saw what you did and it was amazing.”
“You’re wet,” she said. “Your sweatshirt is soaked and heavy. I’m worried sick about you.”
Where does the Snow Queen live? As it turns out, in a small, cramped apartment on the third floor of a nearby building on the corner of Seventeenth and Church. When love appears it’s a supernatural thing like the songs say, but eventually you have to get out of bed, even on the coldest of days, and pay the rent. She held the door open for him.
“Do you have to invite me in?” Mike asked. “Is it like vampires?”
“I should have known,” the Snow Queen said, “that a boy your age would have a thing for vampires. As you well know, that’s what made my fortune, my boy.”
They walked in and saw what she was talking about. The place was little more than some walls and a kitchenette, and everywhere were very large stacks of magazines, and photographs taped to the walls every which way. I told you it was cramped. Mike walked quietly and took it in while the Snow Queen took off her shawl and boiled water for tea. “You should take off you
r sweatshirt, dear.”
“Mike,” Mike said, and took off his sweatshirt. “Look, you really were an actress. These pictures are you in old monster movies.”
“That was me,” the Snow Queen said. “Dracula’s daughter. A girl who comes across a terrible secret at her uncle’s castle. Look, in this one a ghost falls in love with me and we go to a restaurant. It’s a comedy. Here I’m going mad when they’re reading the hypnotist’s last will and testament, and in the corner a terrible creature is taking me away.”
Mike’s shirt was soaked too, and he took it off and handed it to her without thinking. “Here you are something else,” he said. She found a towel and touched his bare back as she drooped it around his shoulders like a shawl, and he shivered. “You have white makeup and a cape and a cardboard crown.”
“The Snow Queen,” the Snow Queen said.
“Are you really?” Mike asked.
“How did my lines sound?” she asked back.
“At one point,” Mike said, “one time it sounded like you said fingersauce.”
“Hardly the words of the netherworld of Kata,” the Snow Queen said, and unlaced his shoes, sneaker by sneaker.
“Was it fun?” Mike asked. “A movie star? I bet you got to go to parties.”
“It’s funny you should say parties,” the Snow Queen said sadly. “I had this part over there, taped up near the light switch, where I was sort of a ghost grandma. I had a line, ‘It’s a party!’ They had me do it fifteen times, ‘It’s a party! It’s a party! It’s a party! It’s a party! It’s a party! It’s a party! It’s a party! It’s a party! It’s a party! It’s a party! It’s a party! It’s a party! It’s a party! It’s a party! It’s a party!’ And it never even made it into the picture. Nobody wanted to hear it. You can say something and say something, but still nobody wants to hear it.”
“I want to hear it,” Mike said, his soaking socks off.
“I was in love,” the Snow Queen said. “That was the last thing I was in, and the director fell in love with me, or anyway we had a baby. But the baby passed on.”
“My baby sister passed on,” Mike said.
“It’s a terrible thing,” the Snow Queen said. “I’ve barely gotten out of bed since, and the director too. He couldn’t think of anything else but all those monster stories. I ran away from him and wasted away all my money to forget, and if I had one wish now, it would be for that baby back, something to love on these cold days alone.”
“If your baby was alive,” asked Mike, “would it be my age?”
“Oh goodness no,” the Snow Queen said, and then slapped her strong hands on her knees. “If you could have one wish, what would it be for your turn?”
Mike looked out the window down at the street. Most of the signs were dark, and some of the rain was almost hail. “I guess calamari,” he said, blushing because he knew it was dumb. “I had it in Santa Cruz and I really liked it, but probably I can’t have it now.”
The Snow Queen smiled and walked over to her freezer. Inside it was so covered in frost there was only one thing in it. She pulled it out and threw it on the table in front of him. It was a bag of calamari, frozen and pictured on the packaging. Everything she said was coming true. She was a prophetess, something from elsewhere, and this is part of love too. You must believe what is happening, every pronouncement the love is making, or you might as well go back to the diner and wait for someone who has forgotten you completely. “I have a microwave,” the Snow Queen pronounced grandly. “It’ll be ready in three to five minutes.”
In three to five minutes the world can change, and three to five minutes might even be a generous estimate for a relationship between a young boy and an older woman from the netherworld of Kata, if you know what I mean. But all love gets over, and we must get over it. Even Mike, young as he was, knew that the guy he was waiting for at the diner wasn’t going to show. The whole world seemed up in that apartment, like the freezer of the Snow Queen might give them a limitless menu if they could just wish for everything they wanted. They grinned at the microwave, Mike especially because he was the one who loved the calamari, but the Snow Queen too, because she was the one who loved him. He was innocent, a rare commodity, and some might say she should leave him alone. But she’d been left alone too long, and who are those people anyway, bickering in the corner and saying such things? Love like this, it was better than sitting in a diner doing nothing, because look what has arrived for Andrea! A man who will treat her badly! Tony!
“Are you open?” Tony said. “I can’t tell.”
“We’re always open,” Andy said. “Any diner worth its salt is open twenty-four hours a day.”
“I’m in the mood for a drink,” Tony said.
Andrea twirled all the way around on her stool, as the diner was the sort of place where that could be done. She was not going to see the Snow Queen today, not again, but in the meantime here was something who could help her through three to five minutes. “I recommend the Suffering Bastard,” she said. “It’s four parts gin, three parts brandy, one part lime juice, sugar syrup, Angostura bitters, ginger ale, and it’s garnished with a slice of cucumber.”
“Sounds good to me,” Tony said. “Somebody give us two of those.” He would treat her badly, but in the meantime love like this was better. Better something poured over ice, than just the ice outside in a heap by itself.
“We don’t serve party drinks like that,” Andy said. “This is a diner, and even if we did I wouldn’t serve you two that. I’ve seen a miracle today, and I want to see more of them, so I’m spending the rest of the evening scraping the paint off these windows of mine. I’d make the cook make you a drink, I guess, if we had such things.”
“Idaho,” said the cook, lost again to us, but nobody heard him because Andy had already started scraping. The scraping was such a horrible sound that the woman in the corner looked up and for the first time realized that she was in this story too, not just the one where she bickered with her ghost of a boyfriend.
“No need,” Tony said. “Let’s get out of here and go to a bar. You ever been to the Black Elephant, Andrea?”
“See you later, Andy,” Andrea said.
“You owe me like twenty-six dollars for all those half carafes,” he said, over the scraping.
“She’ll pay you later,” Tony said, and they walked out together like they were going to a masked ball. Out in front of Andy’s was the frozen figure of a man with his hat on, his face icy in the middle of some terrible speech. Toppled, he looked like one of the victims of Pompeii, a city destroyed in a volcano studied by Mike in his classroom a while ago, although now, in the Snow Queen’s apartment, Mike was reciting the three common words, beginning with the letter A, often used to describe magpies. Magpies are artful and aggressive birds who are often attracted to shiny things, which is maybe why Tony turned from the dull gray-white of the man on the sidewalk to the brightening shine of Andrea’s pretty eyes.
“Who’s that?” Tony said, shrugging to the guy.
“Looks like an ex-boyfriend to me,” Andrea said.
“Somebody treated him cold,” Tony said. Although there was plenty of rain, there was no more sunlight on the street, which meant this lousy day was pretty much over, if you know what I mean. If you know what I mean that’s what was happening to them.
“Happens all the time,” Andrea said. “It’s not the end of the world.”
collectively
Saltwater taffy is I guess made from salt water and a whole bunch of sugar, spun or woven or beaten into a substance they sell down by the boardwalk. If you’re in San Francisco, as this love story is, you can head south and see it being made in a shack, next to the shack where they sell tickets and next to the shack where they fry up calamari and give it to you for a price. Just follow the signs. You can’t miss the signs they put up.
This is love, saltwater taffy. Pretty much everybody has had some. Somebody offers it on a day when you have nothing to do, and most likely you’ll take it and
put it in your mouth. It unites us, saltwater taffy, but whose favorite is it? Who likes it best? Just about nobody. So why do we eat it? This love story is about this style of love, this sweet thing that exists unasked for, that everybody eats out of the same bag. But also it is about what it says on the shack. I was there myself, and the large sign said: COME IN AND WATCH US MAKE IT.
I did not want to. Some things are private, no matter how many people know about the sugar and the spinning and such, and this love story is about that part of love too.
There’s a song called “Please Mr. Postman” or maybe it’s just “Mr. Postman.” The postman always had it in his head. It was one of the downsides of his job, that and vicious dogs. He explained this to his son as they reached a flat part of the hill, which like a bunch of things was a false ending. If you had a bird’s-eye view you could see there was more to it. The postman in effect had a bird’s-eye view, from all the days of climbing this hill with mail for everybody.
The son’s name was Mike. It was Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, which after much debate had been changed to Bring Your Child to Work Day, to make it more inclusive. It was fairer this way, it united more people, so the postman had Mike with him on his route.
“Most people think it’s just delivering mail, just finding the right house and slipping it into the slot,” the postman said, “but there’s more to it than that.” He started to list some things about his job Mike might not know, more or less off the top of his head. Mike sort of listened. “Everybody gets mail, is the thing. No matter where they live. Mail unites us, son, and at a time like this with volcanoes and wicked men we need that.”
“My teacher says the volcano thing isn’t true,” Mike said.
“She would, that teacher of yours,” the postman said. “Teachers used to be city employees and they never got married, and now look. They still are. But in my day we all had to stand up and say the same thing to the flag on the wall. Do you do the pledge?”
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