Thin Ice (The Oshkosh Trilogy)

by Carson, Anthea

  “What, and he didn’t say anything?”

  “He didn’t seem to be paying attention to anything. He was just there. It’s not all about you, Jane.”

  “But you said it was all about me; you said they were talking about me.”

  “Now that I think about it, Paul got up and left when the subject of you came up. He went upstairs. He and Glinda both went upstairs after Glinda and Ziggy started arguing.”

  “I can’t believe Paul was there, and Mrs. D. Why don’t I ever get invited to these parties? You know what, never mind. Don’t answer that. I don’t want to hear another one of your smart remarks.”

  “Okay, good, because I had one ready.”

  I’d been upstairs occasionally when there had been dinner parties downstairs. The dining room was directly below Glinda’s room. Sometimes we’d be over there, like when Paul and I used to lie on the floor making out. It seemed like such a long time ago.

  It was like our house, in a way. We all sort of lived there. It seemed to belong to all of us. Ziggy would go into his bedroom and close the door and say, “Turn the TV off when you guys leave.”

  I probably wouldn’t be lying on the floor making out with Paul there any time soon.

  If Paul was up in Glinda’s room, what were those two doing there together?

  I could accept that Gay was invited to these parties. It was like she had found a second home there (or maybe a first), but Paul?

  I thought about this, obsessed about it while driving, until Gay finally said, “Either smoke some dope and mellow the fuck out or drop me off anywhere.”

  “Where do you want to be dropped off, home?” I asked. “Because I don’t care. I’m going to obsess.”

  “Then take me over to the Sinclairs.”

  “I’d come in with you, but if Glinda’s there she’d probably throw me down the stairs.”

  “Probably.”

  I dropped her off, parking along the side of the road, feeling some sadness because since I wasn’t smoking dope anymore, I didn’t have a reason to go inside. I mean, when I used to go over there, it was always to buy dope. Then we’d smoke a bowl together, and usually end up going somewhere together in my car, on an errand for Ziggy, or to pick up the dope from his dealer, because he had run out of his supply.

  After Gay left, slamming the door behind her, I sat there a moment in my car. The old, blue, run-down Victorian house looked like it was ready to fall in shambles. The front garden was overrun with weeds, but had an odd kind of beauty. The flowers had gone wild.

  3

  Krishna’s room was like a tree-house kid’s club for stoners. Since I wasn’t smoking anything but cigarettes or drinking anything but coffee, I started noticing things, things I’d never seen before, like photos on the wall of people I didn’t know. I wondered who they were. Trinkets on the shelves unlike anything you could purchase in this country. I wondered what those were, and where she’d found them. She had quite a few photos of the Transistors on the wall, the band that both her brother and Paul were in, and that Ziggy managed. These photos were quite large, and professionally done, making them look like real rock stars, like the ones on the punk albums we listened to, and lusted over.

  I was smoking twice as many cigarettes, and drinking twice as many cups of coffee now.

  I tapped my ash into the big-lips ashtray she’d made in Mr. Simon’s pottery class, and said, “Did Paul say anything?”

  “Oh God, not that again.” She sighed loudly. She was lighting the red candle that was held by Ames’s white hand. The arm stuck up out of the table like a dying man begging for help. Incense burned, and the smoke of it stung my nostrils. Krishna lit one of her cloves.

  “I mean, come on, I know I’m being annoying, but he must have said something.”

  “He said it was weird.”

  “Hmm. I wonder what he meant by that. Are you sure he didn’t say anything else?”

  Krishna had taken out two bottles of fingernail polish: one gold, one silver. She was putting them on alternate fingers. She started with the thumb, with gold.

  I knew how annoyed she’d be if I asked again. I tried not to. I tried really hard. I lit a cig and smoked half of it in silence, watching her paint her pointer finger silver and then her third finger gold. She was dipping the brush in the glittery silver when I said, “So when he said it was weird, what was he responding to? I mean, in what context did he say it?”

  Her eyes flicked up at me, but the rest of her face remained static. She didn’t stop painting her ring finger. It was ridiculous to call it her ring finger, because she wore rings on every finger, including her thumb. They weren’t pretty rings with sparkly gems, but things like . . . almost anything.

  One ‘ring’ was a bent-up spoon cut off with a jagged edge at the base. That was the only thing it could have possibly been. I had to conclude this myself because when I asked her about it, she shrugged. But what else could it have been? I had seen spoon rings, but I wasn’t sure about this one. It had that curling metal décor only found at the base of a spoon. The ring was wrapped around her thumb like a snake, and, as is the case with most eating utensils, it had dark grooves where some substance had deposited. What was that substance? Ziggy would know. He knew everything.

  “Did he say anything else?” I asked, eying the spoon ring.

  Krishna had a growl. She only used it on occasion, but she used it now. It was a low thing, like a wolf or a dangerous dog.

  What could I do? I had to find out what he’d said. I couldn’t ignore it. I couldn’t let it go and go on to tomorrow as if nothing had happened. “Come on!” I urged her.

  “Smoke some fucking dope.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Sure you can. I have some. It’s great. You’ll forget all about it.”

  “No.”

  “Okay, then listen to me read some Shakespeare,” she said. She began reading from Hamlet, her favorite. Many times, she’d told me she wished she could find someone like Hamlet to fall in love with.

  Today, she could tell I wasn’t listening, that I was listening instead to my own obsessive and obnoxious thoughts about Paul and what he was feeling and what he was thinking. She slammed shut the book. “Stop thinking about him.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes you can.”

  “It’s easy for you,” I said. “You don’t feel anything. You go through men like used tissues, discarding them one after the other.”

  Krishna paused. Her black eyes glittered with her nail polish, sparkling gold and silver. She held her clove cigarette between her fingers and took a long drag. She held the smoke in her lungs a long time, as if she were smoking a joint, then blew out a long stream of smoke and tapped out her cig in the lips ashtray.

  Since nothing seemed to be forthcoming I said, “What?”

  “It isn’t sex that hurts; it’s attachment,” she said.

  “I never had sex with him. I’m a virgin,” I said.

  “Uh, we know that, Jane.”

  “Why? How?”

  “Because,” she tapped her ash again in the tray and giggled, “you’re still playing with Barbie dolls.”

  “What you mean by that?”

  She focused back on her coffee table and poured out a cup of tea from a strange pot. It was silver, and had a beautiful and an unnecessarily elongated handle with twirls on the tip. She showed the pot to me, smiled, and gestured toward it with a particular type of gesture. She held it out wickedly and pointed to it.

  “I don’t like tea,” I said.

  “Tea is great.” She smiled, as if I had just told her that I loved tea.

  “I’ve sworn off the heartbreak that comes from before,” I said. “It doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t help.”

  “Ha!” she said. “It does in my case.”

  We sat in silence for a while, me smoking my cigarette and trying to sip the tea, she focused on relighting some incense. She had changed the record to Bob Dylan, and turned the sound down.

>   “Were you at the dinner party at the Sinclairs?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I heard Paul was there. Did he say anything?”

  She glared up at me. She stood up and said, “I have a song for you.”

  She leaned over the stereo and placed the needle down, after finding a Rolling Stones album, one with a particularly ugly and in-your-face picture of Mick on the cover.

  I listened, and waited patiently.

  Her head tilted slightly to the left, her black curls giving the illusion of being longer on that side. First the catchy tune and then, “Look at that stupid girl.”

  I wasted no time exiting. Past the desk with the red phone, around the cluttered corner, past the posters on the stairwell, past her mom’s, “See ya later,” and home in the blue Chevette. The lyrics ran through my head while I drove along the edge of Menominee Park.

  The beautiful, green colors outside my window gave me no joy. They only looked dark.

  How insulting, I thought. I thought a great many other things as well, most of them considerably nastier.

  My keys clinked and skidded across the rippled glass table. My mom was home. She said something to me as I passed through the kitchen. It wasn’t unfriendly, but I sure was. I went to the black lacquer-top counter and took out a pan. Before I could boil some water for a cup of coffee, the phone rang.

  It was Krishna, giggling on the line.

  “Do you think that after what has happened this week you should be going over to Krishna’s?” asked my dad. We were sitting at the table in the kitchen. I was on my fifth cup of coffee and halfway through the pack of cigarettes I had bought that morning.

  “I don’t know. What should I do after a suicide attempt? I mean, what’s the protocol, Dad?” I tapped out my ash into the green, glass ashtray.

  Every time I looked at that ashtray, I remembered the dinner parties, the professors, the wine glasses clinking, and being young enough to be sent to bed. These were the ashtrays my mom brought out and set on the coffee and side tables: the green, glass one, and the small, circular one with the red, velvet beanbag underneath it. It had the cushion so you could set it on the couch. I’d figured that out one day. I had thought a lot about that ashtray. Both ashtrays, actually. The green, glass one was an odd shape, almost like modern art.

  “Besides,” I continued, “it had nothing to do with Krishna.”

  “Well,” Dad began, standing near the counter, “I suppose you have a point about that. But you shouldn’t drink that much alcohol.”

  “I stopped drinking,” I said.

  “That’s good,” he said. “Because alcohol can be a little dangerous. And I care about you.”

  I lit another cigarette, after smashing out the last one into the green, glass ashtray.

  “When is Mom getting home with the car?”

  “She should be home soon,” he said. “She’s just gone to the store.”

  “Can I use your car?”

  He hesitated for a moment, then pulled his keys out of his pocket and held them in his hand, staring at them.

  I stood up, finished gulping down my coffee, and went to retrieve the keys from him.

  “I need to leave right now, Dad. I have to be somewhere.”

  I stood a half-inch taller than him. I took the keys out of his hand.

  He said, “Okay, be careful.”

  I left, slamming the screen door behind me.

  4

  Sleeping people lay on the floor under blankets a few feet away. I sat cross-legged, tapping my ashes on the green ashtray, staring at the swirls in the glass, turning it this way and that, watching the way it caught the sunlight. The sound I made sliding the ashtray across the tabletop was the only thing I could hear.

  I stood when I heard the kettle whistle, stepping over the sleepers. When I returned with my coffee, Chrystal was awake and reaching for her menthols. She discovered she was out, crumpled the empty pack, and tossed it on the floor. The cellophane returned to its original shape, but the box stayed crumpled.

  “Can I bum one of your horrible smokes?” she asked.

  I tossed her one of my Marlboros, then tried the lighter again and again. Out of fluid. I grabbed the matches from on top of the fireplace.

  “Can I get a cup of coffee?” she asked.

  I brought her one.

  She blew out a long stream of smoke and said, “You’re not hungover, like the rest of us will be. You’re lucky.”

  I shrugged. “What does luck have to do with it?”

  “Nothing,” she laughed, from where she lay on the floor. She had great freckles.

  “I can see why you’re avoiding Glinda,” she said. It wasn’t a comment out of the blue. It was a carryover from a conversation we’d been having the night before. We had been the last two awake. “I mean, she’s sort of unpredictable.”

  “It’s not that I’m afraid of her; I’m not,” I said. “She’s too elegant to physically attack me or carry out any of her threats.”

  “I know what you mean,” she said. “I have a class with her. I don’t understand why she’s mad at you.”

  “’Cause of Paul,” I said.

  “She wants him for herself?”

  “No,” I said. “She wanted me to break up with him, for Lucy.”

  “For Lucy? Yeah, I remember.” She tapped a long ash into the tray. “Because of the baby. It’s too late for that.”

  I finished my coffee and headed for the kitchen.

  “Get me another cup too,” she called after me, handing me her empty one.

  As I waited for the water to boil, I surveyed the leaves outside and listened to the birds singing. I thought, A watched pot never boils.

  When I returned, I had a new question I wanted to ask Chrystal. I set both cups down on the coffee table, careful not to spill them.

  “Chrystal,” I began, “have you seen Paul?”

  “Just at school,” she said.

  “I’m just wondering, because I haven’t heard from him. He didn’t come to the hospital to see me.”

  “Why did you try to kill yourself?” she interrupted.

  I stared blankly at her.

  “I mean, seriously.” She lit a new cigarette. She tried to drink some of her coffee, but it burned her lips. A cigarette was a great way to cool down a cup of coffee. By the time you were done smoking it, the coffee’s temperature was just right.

  I wasn’t really listening to her. She continued talking about the suicide. I didn’t find it that interesting. But then she said, “I mean, you have all that makeup.”

  “What?”

  “Your makeup.”

  Again, I said, “What?”

  “Why would you try to kill yourself? You have all that makeup.”

  I stared blankly at her.

  “In your bathroom.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know where my makeup is.”

  “So why would you kill yourself?”

  “Are you saying that since I have lots of makeup in my bathroom, I have no reason to kill myself?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  I took a sip of my coffee, which had cooled while I had listened to her drone on.

  “Do you want some of my makeup? Is that something that has a lot of value to you?” I asked her.

  “Well, I couldn’t afford to buy all that, that’s all I know,” she said.

  I sighed.

  I looked around at the sleeping bodies on the floor around us. They were knocked out. My living room was rectangular, with doors on both short sides. There was a little trapezoid window nook on the wall that faced outside, and a fireplace near me, where I sat. We never used the fireplace anymore. When I had been a kid, we’d used it a lot at Christmas time and during the winter, sipping hot chocolate and watching the flames.

  “So, you said that you had only seen Paul in class,” I said. “Did he look different or anything? Did he seem upset?”

  “I don’t know,” Chrystal said. “I don’t know w
hat he seems like normally.”

  “Of course you do; you know him. You see him all the time when we go over to Ziggy’s house, or when we go to see them in concert.”

  “Yeah, I love going to their concerts,” she said, “the Transistors are great. I can’t wait for prom. Did you know they are playing?”

  “Of course. And in Chicago, too,” I said.

  “You weren’t there for the Battle of the Bands,” she said. “That was fun.”

  “Were Lucy and Paul together at that time?”

  “I don’t remember,” she said. “I think so. Or maybe Lucy was with Raj then.”

  “I wonder where he is,” I said. “He hasn’t been around. I heard he was at—”

  A pillow whacked me in the face, knocking my coffee over.

  “Hey!” I shouted. My cigarette also had been knocked out of my hand. Not the whole cigarette, just the cherry, which could potentially start a fire. I madly patted around, trying to find it. I felt it burning my leg. It had landed in the carpet. I slapped at it, and smashed it with the green pillow he had thrown at me. He hadn’t apologized yet, either.

  “Ziggy, what’d you do that for?” I shouted.

  He wasn’t answering; he had turned on his other side, and was facing away.

  “We need a towel to clean up the coffee,” said Chrystal.

  “What is his problem?” I said.

  “Stop talking about Paul,” he said. “Stop it.”

  Chrystal and I cleaned up the coffee in silence. I didn’t feel comfortable obsessing about Paul out loud any more.

  I stopped, or would try to, at least around Ziggy. Of all people, he was the one I wanted to ask most, because the dinner party had been at his house.

  I whispered as quietly as I could to Chrystal, “Were you at that dinner party at Ziggy’s?”

  “Stop, Jane,” Ziggy said again.

  “God,” I said. “Ziggy, your hearing is insanely good.”

  5

  The highway humming along underneath the tires lulled me. I listened to the others chatter about music, watched empty beer cans being tossed out the windows, and thought about nothing but Paul. The nothing where Paul was.