by Karen Brown
“You don’t trust anything,” he said, despondent. He let my hand drop. I had to retrieve his hand and tell him to stop it. I wondered if this was love, this constant reclamation, this rush to reassure. We kept walking and he steered me past the railroad tracks, into an end of town I had never been, not even with Angela in her Volvo. We stopped at the head of a path. Below us a creek, not yet frozen, rushed in the dark. To the right were scattered twinkling lights, and a soft din of conversation. I sensed low-built dwellings coated with snow and imagined people in them. There were several fires burning. The place smelled of woodsmoke and the dank creek mud.
William Bell took my hand. “Let’s go,” he said.
Of course, I would not. He looked back at me, calmly chastising. “These people know me,” he said.
My feet had grown cold in my boots. I didn’t know what he would need to say to make me walk down the path with him. He stepped toward me and slid his two hands up under my coat, under my sweater and T-shirt. His hands on my skin, the press of his fingertips, were somehow consoling, familiar.
“You must trust me,” he said, softly, into my hair.
And I was not sure whether it was that I trusted him, or that I worried if I didn’t, he would take his hands away forever. He held my hand again and we went down the path worn muddy by others’ footsteps. The enclave consisted of tents and tarps strung on two-by-fours. Strung bulbs or Christmas lights, powered by small generators, lit some of the dwellings. There were end tables with small, shaded lamps and tinny radios. Under the tarps or around the fires, the people sat in aluminum chairs, the kind with plastic slats, low-slung canvas chairs, camp chairs, the type you took to an outdoor concert or a kid’s sports game, or the beach. The people eyed us warily. They were dressed for the weather, in layers of clothes that made them look lumpy, and all of the same size and sex. We kept walking down the narrow paths. The snow fell, landing in their fires, and hissing. The mud sucked at my boots. From the tents came the smells of stale breath, refuse, dirty clothes hampers. We arrived at a fire removed from the others. Around it, the people laughed and passed a bottle around. They smoked, and their exhaling formed large clouds about their heads. When they saw William, they greeted him all at once.
“Well, if it isn’t Mr. Bell Jr.,” one said.
There were no chairs for us. We stood beside their group, feeling the warmth of their fire on our faces.
“What do you have for us?” someone else asked. I wondered if this was a kind of password, or mode of entry, the bringing of something, like a gift. I still could not distinguish between the men and the women. Their voices were the same—deep and gravelly. They wore knitted caps, some with pompoms, some striped and bright. They seemed like children sitting by the fire.
“I’ve brought the woman I’m going to marry,” William said.
I looked at him, quickly, and stepped away. “What?” I said.
There was a sudden quiet. A throat was cleared, raspy, horrible. Either William’s announcement, or my objection, was out of place in their circle. I thought I saw one person roll his eyes.
“Oh Lord, get Billy Bell out here,” another said.
Around us the snow blew softly. The sky was a black bowl, starless. I could see the shapes of trees, their remaining leaves withered and clinging, lonely shapes on slender twigs. A man emerged from one of the nearby tents. He was tall and well built. He wore a heavy tweed overcoat and lumbered up to us. In the firelight, I saw his eyes in his roughened face that were exactly like William Bell’s.
“What now?” he said, gruff, unforgiving.
He pulled out a cigarette from his pocket and then looked to the group for a light. William took a silver Zippo from his own pocket and lit the man’s cigarette. Both of their hands went up to cup the flame from the wind. Here was the man who lined up mowers on his front lawn with prices handwritten on cardboard placards, who with youthful earnestness argued cases in a courtroom in downtown Ithaca. I noticed he was unsteady, swaying in his long coat.
“Did you hear?” someone around the fire said. “He’s brought the woman he is going to marry.”
“Or not,” snickered someone else. The group laughed, tentatively, not sure of what to make of this situation.
The tall man sighed. He wore a wool Burberry scarf tucked into his collar. He would not look at either of us.
“Get out of here,” he said, quietly. His voice was ominous, threatening.
William Bell stayed. They were nearly the same height.
“I thought you should meet,” he said. I sensed the sarcasm in his voice, a kind of tremor. I saw that once, the older man would have put his hand on William’s shoulder, or taken him in his arms. I knew that William was waiting for all of these things.
Someone in the circle started singing a low, bawdy song. Something about wedded and bedded, O. Others joined in, creating a distraction, an odd background accompaniment. The older man turned and stumbled back into his tent. I figured he would have his place to sit there, his bottle. He could listen to our retreating footsteps in the mud and feel whatever it was he felt—compunction, sorrow. As we left, the other groups around their fires joined in the song. There was cackling laughter, not derisive, but a waylaid sadness. I imagined all of them having slipped down their own lives to this place, forsaken, or perhaps unwilling to let anyone lay claim to them. We made our way up the embankment, listening to the creek slough its banks. Soon, the temperature would dip and its surface would still and thicken. Underneath the rainbow trout would sit, dumb and cowed, waiting for spring.
I did not talk about the incident of that evening to William Bell. We returned to my apartment and it was dawn. We walked home in silence. I held his hand. Upstairs we met Professor Harrow in his plaid robe and slippers. His ankles were bare and white. He seemed dazed, standing on the landing. It was cold, and our breath came out around our heads.
“Good morning,” he mumbled, standing there as if he’d been chased from his room by something to which he did not wish to return. I put my key in the lock and regretted seeing him like that. Inside the apartment it was still cold, still gray and dark.
William Bell sat heavily on the end of the bed and put his face in his hands. The elm scraped my window. The snow fell, invisibly, blending into the whitish morning. I sat down beside William and felt I might save him with a profession of love. I pushed him down on the bed and looked into his face. He shook his head and tried to turn away.
“Look at me,” I said, and he did.
We looked at each other for a long time, believing we knew what the other thought. I saw I could imagine anything about him, even a past he might never confess. I saw this was what love was.
“Will you?” he asked.
I kissed him. His hands fell back into place on my body. We both got what we wanted, I think. A notary in an old house on Tioga married us in a civil ceremony. Outside, the snow was like powdered sugar falling through a sieve. It didn’t seem real. It was like stage snow, pretty and harmless. As we spoke our vows, though, it turned to ice, and slanted against the window, a vindictive tapping.
We had very little money. He worked for a few weeks at Agway, selling snow shovels and bags of salt and lightbulbs, and I was proud of him, getting up at a normal hour, showering and putting on clean clothes. He came home sedate and smelling like a springtime lawn, and I was happy. Then he quit. He acquired and left a succession of jobs, and I discovered that this was his pattern, and he saw nothing wrong with it. I stayed with him in Ithaca for the Christmas holiday. His sister had been furious when she’d found out we’d married, and she refused to have anything to do with us, so I hadn’t, yet, told my own family. It seemed then the most foolish of things to do with my life.
We fell into a kind of decline. The apartment was cluttered and unclean. I had a small stove and a few pots that we washed out when we needed them. They sat on the burners with their previous contents congealing. William’s bits of magnetized wire, bulbs, circuits, and metal shavings li
ttered the window ledges. The little Christmas tree still sat in its pot on the table by the window, its branches absent of any green life. The glass ornaments slipped off, one at a time at night. In the darkness, they made small splashing sounds when they shattered, like spilling water.
Winter in upstate New York is interminable. The snow was a burden in piled banks, an endless tumbling of flakes. Icicles hung from the house’s eaves, deadly threats you ducked under, or knocked off with a shovel. The reaches of snow were vast, wide, white fields rolling on and on. There was a bitter wind that rattled the windows in their frames. I didn’t think I could stand it, and I told William Bell, and he gave me his look of reproof. Consider the people in the encampment, his look said. We had not gone back there again, though I suspected that William did. When we shopped at Goodwill, looking for a writing table, he purchased clothing and shoes that I never saw him wear. Often, Angela offered us food, extra loaves of bread, casseroles in disposable tins, and it disappeared. I didn’t question him about anything. I let the undiscussed spaces in our life together flourish. I didn’t care where he went or what he did, as long as he returned to me.
And then one afternoon I came home and the chairs that went around my small table were missing. Another day the lamp was gone, and then the table itself. These things were not acceptable, I told him. He stared at me, blankly, with his beautiful flushed cheeks. He did not return that night, or the next, or the next, when the snow stopped, and things began to melt and drip. I called his sister but hung up on the answering machine. For two weeks I went to my classes and came home, and he was still gone. I began to imagine Sister Margaret Mary, just before her flight, her unrequited body prone on her narrow bed in her sparsely furnished room. There was her dark clothing in the closet, and above the small chest of drawers the brassy body of Christ on the cross, the object onto which she safely fastened her own longing. And then I came back from class one evening and the hangers that once held his clothes were bare wires, and the bureau drawer where he kept his sweaters and balls of socks was empty.
I distracted myself with cleaning, left the windows open and let the cold air blow through the place. I brushed William’s magnetized pieces of wire and metal out the window into the snow below. I used bleach and scrubbed, borrowed Angela’s mop. I loaded the blankets and sheets in her car and drove them to the Laundromat, maneuvering around the potholes in the streets, the slush spraying up onto the windshield. Outside, without William Bell, the world was changing.
At the Laundromat, I saw a boy I’d met when I first came to school. I could not remember his name, but he remembered mine, and he asked me what I was reading, and what courses I was taking this semester, and then asked me more things, and I realized I wasn’t answering him the way I normally might because I was married now, and I felt the boundaries of this without really wanting to. The big hot dryers rolled and tumbled. Pieces of lint floated past. And I looked at his earnest expression, his eyes lit with genuine interest, and I looked at myself as he saw me: my hair too long, uncombed, my sweater with its unraveling wool hem, the smell of bleach on my hands. And I wondered, crazily, if he could love me. “Help me take my stuff to my car,” I said.
He grabbed armfuls. I opened the Volvo’s trunk and we put the sheets and blankets inside. And then we stood in the slush in the cold, filling the space between us with our fogging breath. “Come home with me and help me make the bed,” I said.
He glanced around, as if someone might witness all of this occurring, as if he’d stepped into a story and been asked to play a role. He didn’t smile and answer right away. Then I saw him bite the inside of his cheek.
“Are you serious?” he said, quietly, covertly.
I shrugged. “Of course,” I told him.
Climbing into his car, he was eager and quick. He drove that way, too, following too close behind, almost hitting me once at a stop sign. At my house I parked at the curb and he carried everything in his arms up the stairs. His footsteps were light, glancing off each step, careening up to the landing, where he had to wait for me to unlock the door. I heard him breathing behind the pile of laundry.
Inside, the breeze had whipped things into a frenzy. Magazines and manuscript pages had blown onto the floor. The curtains were caught up in their rods. All of the old smells seemed resurrected—fireplace ashes, oak polish, the walls’ dampened plaster. It wasn’t unpleasant. It felt cold and fiercely alive.
“It is freezing in here,” the boy said.
I imagined he dreaded removing his clothes.
I shut the windows and the room stilled. I turned to him and tried to remember his name. We were in the Native American class on the third floor of the Andrew White house. We read the story of the Lakota. He grinned at me from across the room. I saw he had no idea what to do, and without any complicity, neither did I.
“This is the bed,” I said. The mattress was thin in the pitiless March light. He grabbed an end of a sheet, and we stretched it out from either side. From the pile of bedsheets we found the one to go on top, our heads bumping, sorting through everything. His hair smelled of shampoo. The room filled with the smell of clean laundry. We made the bed. He was very competent and serious, as if this was really what he had expected. When we were done he sat down on the edge.
“I want a cigarette,” he said. He looked up at me apologetically.
“I don’t smoke,” I told him. I sat down on the bed next to him.
“Maybe we should go out and have a few pitchers of beer,” he said.
I took his hand and placed it on my leg. We both looked at it, a fine hand with long fingers and bulky knuckles. “There isn’t a set way to go about this,” I told him. “Either you want me more than a cigarette, or you don’t.”
He chuckled and ran his free hand through his hair. He would not look at me at all. “Do you do this a lot?” he asked. “I mean you’re a pretty girl. I could be the Creeper.”
I asked him what he meant, and he told me the story of the Collegetown Creeper, how he showed up in women’s unlocked apartments while they slept. They awoke to him standing over their beds, or sitting idly in a chair wearing a wide-brimmed hat. I imagined they did not look favorably on his presence or invite him to bed. They screamed, and swore at him, and called the authorities. I looked at the boy’s fine-boned face, his eyebrows drawn together, telling his story.
“You aren’t him,” I said.
“Didn’t you go to Wellesley?” he asked.
I told him he must have me confused with someone else.
“Didn’t you go to Yale?” I asked him, playing along.
He laughed then. “No, I didn’t,” he said.
“Well then,” I said. “We aren’t who we thought we were.”
The spot of sun on the bed was almost warm. “We are just imitations of what we thought,” he said.
His hand on my leg heated it up. Our bodies touched at the shoulder and hip. They sank at varying depths into the too-thin mattress. “What if we kiss?” I suggested. Anything to stop his musing.
He put both of his hands on my face then and held it like a bowl you might tip and drink from. I felt my heart shift and give, dislodged from its winter hibernation. Most men exhibit at least one endearing gesture, and this was his. His mouth was soft and he closed his eyes. We kissed for a long time on the clean-smelling bed. He whispered my name like a summoning spell. I didn’t even know his. I wouldn’t have said it, anyway. I knew he wouldn’t stay, that once he was through and his clothing back on he would saunter out into the hallway, relieved to be done with me, grateful and changed, but still relieved. It was this way with all of them afterward. When they left, they always gave me something. “You’re sweet,” they’d say. I’d have put on his undershirt, and when I began to remove it he’d tell me, “No, keep it.” One gave me his St. Christopher’s medal on a tarnished chain, another his L.L.Bean Windbreaker. Often, when they spent the night, I dreamed I heard William’s boots clomping up the stairs, scraping mud outside the door. H
e would come in and stand by the bed in the gray light. I’d search his face for some evidence of my betrayal and find none. His eyes did their usual sad dance over the body he no longer held, and then he turned and left the room. Sometimes, in the dream, I chased after him. And sometimes, awake, I did the same, slipping out of bed and down the stairs, out the front door onto the porch. I’d stand there, shivering, half-dressed, fooled by what was dream and what was real, no longer able to tell the difference.
At Easter I finally went home to visit and when I returned to my apartment it had been emptied of its furnishings. Angela was out of town. When I knocked on Professor Harrow’s door he answered and placed a hand on my arm. His eyes held a blinking lasciviousness I had never noticed before. “Well, well,” he said, and I pulled my arm away. “I assumed you’d moved out.” There had been banging on the stairs, he told me, and a pickup truck at the curb. I knew William Bell had been there and taken everything. I would not go looking. I did not trust what I wanted to find—my duck-carved chair inside the flap of a tent, its legs sunk in muddied earth, the bed unfolded from the couch in the broad spring sunlight. I might have begged to stay, to lie down on the worn sheets that smelled of melting snow. At night the little strung lights must leave spangles on the canvas like stars. The bonfire smoke invades clothing and pores. The creek rushes its banks again with fervor. I no longer remember the day we married, only the day I knew we would, those moments with my heart warm and rapt, the silent promise of the frozen world, the elm chafing in its coat of ice.
The Longings of Wayward Girls
The dark side of a seemingly perfect Connecticut suburb comes to light when one woman’s long-buried secrets refuse to stay in the past, in this engrossing debut novel of psychological suspense.
It’s an idyllic New England summer, and Sadie is a precocious only child on the edge of adolescence. It seems like July and August will pass lazily by, just as they have every year before. But one day, Sadie and her best friend play a seemingly harmless prank on a neighborhood girl. Soon after, that same little girl disappears from a backyard barbecue—and she is never seen again.
