by Larry Watson
“What makes me so damn mad,” Monty continued, “is that I’m a better man now. Stronger, more sure of myself. Now I could put up a helluva fight for you, Alma. A helluva fight.”
He was fairly murmuring these words in her ear, bent over her back, his hands braced on the sink on either side of her.
“If I could make Ray straighten up and treat you right, I’d cut the orders tomorrow.”
This remark she might have disputed, but by now Monty’s hand was at the front of her throat, softly stroking its length as if he were trying to help her swallow his words.
It would not have been accurate or honest for Alma to pretend that what happened in that hotel bathroom was completely without her acquiescence. But neither would it have been far from the truth.
She may have been mistaken in thinking that what was happening was happening in discrete stages, that the process that had been set in motion could easily be halted or altered at anytime, one moment easily snipped away from the moment that preceded or followed it. But Monty’s seduction was, like so many events in life, composed of units of action and time linked inextricably to one another.
And then, of course, what was occurring was not entirely unfamiliar to Alma. During their time together Monty had often touched her here and here, like this and like this, and he had tried to touch her there and there. What was different now was that it was now . . . and Monty was soon doing what Alma didn’t know could be done.
But a woman doesn’t allow herself to be fucked standing up and holding on to a bathroom fixture just to satisfy her curiosity or dispel her disbelief. She must have been willing. . . . She must have been. . . .
Because she certainly could have stopped it with a scream or a violent twist of her hips, or she could have grabbed his hand and wiped it across her face so he could feel her tears or maybe it would have been enough to lift her head so he could see her reflection in the mirror. . . . As his thrusts increased in force and frequency, the sink’s plug, a black rubber stopper hanging from a little chain looped over the spigot, began to move back and forth. Alma watched it closely, and as it swung from side to side, she imagined it was swinging between the poles of her life—North Dakota, Texas, Texas, North Dakota, Raymond, Monty, Monty, Raymond. . . . Even after Monty gasped and staggered back from her, she kept her focus on the chain and the plug. Soon it was motionless again, hanging above a drain circled with a rusty stain from a faucet that must have dripped for years with no one bothering to fix it.
The following morning, as the first light of a cold Texas dawn found its way into the room, Alma stared up at a blotch on the ceiling. It was about the size of a pumpkin, and its irregular shape was outlined in the same rust-orange color as the stain in the bathroom sink. Only moments before, Raymond had finally roused from his rum-steeped stupor, and now, as she lay under his weight, it was all Alma could do not to interrupt her husband’s grunting efforts to ask him if he thought water was leaking in the room above them.
In the original version of this story, the characters were named Donald and Lois Culpepper and Nick Anschutz. Otherwise the story is exactly as it appears, under the title “A Mild Winter,” in my MFA thesis and later in The Bozeman Review, a now discontinued literary magazine once published at Montana State University. I have never included it in any collection.
Readers sometimes ask me where I get my ideas, and I’m seldom able to provide a satisfactory answer, so vague and various are the sites where most of my fiction is born. But if I were asked about “A Mild Winter,” I could provide a number of answers, all true and all inadequate, as explanations of creative work so often are.
On one of the few occasions when Gene, Marie, and I were together in the Stoddard house (after his father’s death, Gene seldom invited anyone into his home), we looked through the Stoddard family photo albums. One black-and-white photograph, blown up to an eight-by-ten, depicted a small gathering of casually arranged laughing soldiers standing in fresh snow, and Raymond Stoddard, with his lopsided smile and eyes squinting against the sun, stood in the back of the group. The back of the photo carried the penciled caption “761st Tank Battalion, Camp Hood, Texas, December ’42.” If Monty Burnham was in the picture, I didn’t recognize him.
In addition to what the photo provided, I had, in the writing of “A Mild Winter,” my parents’ recollections of life during the war (as I recall I cut a passage of dialogue between “Donald” and “Lois” about ration cards), a little research (also eliminated was a brief mention of mixing egg yolks with margarine to give it the color of butter), and of course the date and year of Marcia Stoddard’s birth. And, more than anything, I had the stimulus—or the irritant—of that Lee Mauer remark I alluded to earlier.
On a warm summer evening I was sitting on our front porch watching for a group of friends to drive up and take me to an American Legion baseball game. My father and Lee Mauer were in the kitchen and, though they kept their voices low and the window screen sifted out parts of their conversation, I heard enough to know they were talking about, as usual, the why of Raymond Stoddard’s last day on earth. Months had passed, and the event had exceeded most people’s attention spans but not my father’s and Lee Mauer’s. Their interest was undiminished, and a new season simply brought new theories, as when Mr. Mauer said, “That Miss Stoddard—am I the only one who sees a helluva resemblance between her and a certain state senator?”
Jay Garner’s Plymouth pulled up to the curb, so I didn’t hear my father’s response, but I had eavesdropped on the two men often enough to know what pattern their talk would follow. Soon one or both of them would be speculating on what might have happened if it were determined that Marcia Stoddard was Monty Burnham’s child.
And suppose Ray found out?
But how could he? After all this time?
Same as I did. He looks at the girl one day, and god damn—he knows. He just knows.
A man makes a discovery like that—he’s sure as hell going to get himself a gun.
Sure as hell.
I never saw the likeness that seemed so obvious to Mr. Mauer, nor do I know if my father did. At one point, years after his remark, I went so far as to lay open two high school yearbooks, one with Monty Burnham’s senior picture and the other with Marcia Stoddard’s. I couldn’t see any resemblance besides youth and the unlined optimism that so often attends it.
Writing “A Mild Winter” didn’t purge me completely of the idea that Monty Burnham was Marcia’s father, but at least I was finally able to do something useful with one of the many notions that kept bubbling to the surface of my thoughts over the years. Far more plentiful are the false starts, the abortive attempts, the unrealized fragments that have accumulated in my notebooks and journals, fading and yellowing in filing cabinets and manila folders.
My father not only had a need to know what had happened with and to Raymond Stoddard, he also felt an obligation to Raymond’s family. Perhaps that began when Gene discovered his father’s body and decided my father was the person to call for help. From that day forward, he was ready to provide any support the Stoddards might need, whether it was jump-starting a car, providing legal advice (adding to the bureaucratic complications that can accompany a death was the fact that Raymond didn’t leave a will), helping with lawn care or household repairs, or offering sympathy. My mother certainly helped Alma Stoddard too, but her aid was perhaps less obvious since it was consistent with the kind of comfort that women generally provide for each other. Lee Mauer was a handier man than my father, and eventually—I think it began with an electrical wiring problem—my father recruited Lee Mauer to join him on those missions to make Alma Stoddard’s life easier. By the time summer came around—and Marcia Stoddard returned to Bismarck—the two men were as likely to be doing chores at the house down the block as they were to be sitting in our kitchen drinking beer.
The amount of time my father—and Mr. Mauer—spent at the Stoddards’ finally led to a quarrel between my parents.
My father and
mother had been to a hardware store and had returned with samples to help them decide what color to paint the house. They walked from back to front, holding those little rectangles of color against a sunlit wall and then a shaded one, but they were talking about much more than tints of blue.
They had obviously been arguing for a time when I heard them, their voices raised near my bedroom window.
“Are you jealous?” my father asked. “For Christ’s sake, are you jealous of Alma Stoddard? After what she’s been through?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Although I am curious to see whose storm windows get taken down first, mine or Alma Stoddard’s. No, you know what’s bothering me: Your reason for being down there. If I could be sure you wanted nothing more than to help someone whose life has turned into hell on earth, I’d say fine, wonderful. But if you’re just down there to spy on that poor woman—that I can’t forgive.”
“Spy . . . ?”
“Oh, don’t pretend. Please. You know what I’m talking about. You and your newfound friend would like nothing better than to discover some kind of secret down there. Playing detective. . . .”
I heard a faint scraping sound, as though one of them were flicking the siding with the cardboard paint sample.
“Playing? Is that what you think we’re doing? Jesus. . . .”
“What I call it or what you call it isn’t the issue. Alma Stoddard deserves some peace in her life. And the two of you intend to use her for your own—”
My mother stopped then, but if I could finish her sentence, my father certainly could as well. Pleasure. My father and Lee Mauer wanted to use Alma Stoddard for their own pleasure.
As it has been tiresomely noted, the early 1960s were a sexually repressed era, at least as far as public expressions were concerned. The teenage males of that time—I include myself—were starved not only for sexual experience but for sexual knowledge, but since so much was denied us, almost any phrase that had—or could be twisted into having—a sexual connotation was titillating. To get inside. To enter. To penetrate. And we had somehow learned that “to know” had the archaic meaning of “to have sexual intercourse,” so that verb too was an occasion for sly smiles or outright ribald laughter.
Yet when I overheard my mother scold my father, the denotative and connotative meanings of words suddenly collapsed onto themselves, tangled, and could not be teased apart.
I knew, on an imaginative if not an experiential level, what it meant to use a woman for one’s own pleasure—it certainly involved knowing her—but my mother accused my father and Lee Mauer of using Alma Stoddard for knowledge of the epistemological rather than the sexual sort. They wanted to get inside, to enter, to penetrate the Stoddard house, the Stoddard psyche, in order to know.
Moments after my mother’s sentence fragment, the front screen door slammed. I peered out of my bedroom and saw that it was my father alone who had walked away from their argument and back into the house.
And whether it was the result of my mother chastising him I couldn’t be sure, but in the house was where my father was soon more often to be found. His fellow spy, however, the real detective, began to log more hours at the Stoddards’. In fact, instead of parking in front of our house and sauntering up our walk with a six-pack under his arm, Lee Mauer was now more likely to pull up to the Stoddards’ curb, and while his presence there was often visible—edging the sidewalk, sealing cracks in the driveway, cleaning the window wells—on as many days and nights he couldn’t be seen. But his car was there. Explanations that he was working out of sight in the backyard or in the basement or garage could last only so long, and with my new awareness of sex and secrets conflated, I soon concluded that Mr. Mauer was there for reasons other than being a Good Samaritan.
It wasn’t quite the same as when I looked out the window on that January day and wondered why my father’s car was parked at the Stoddards’, but I was still curious about why Lee Mauer was so often there. And since my interest was prurient, I was reluctant to ask my parents or Gene Stoddard, the people who would best be able to satisfy my curiosity.
I decided I’d ask Marie Ryan, and of course what I was really doing was using my concern as an excuse to call her.
When I telephoned and told her that I wanted to talk about the Stoddard family, I tried to imply that the matter was serious enough that we shouldn’t discuss it over the telephone. My strategy worked. She invited me to meet her at Elks Swimming Pool during the evening hours set aside for family swimming. She would be there with the two children she was babysitting that summer. Gene had a job with his uncle’s construction crew, and when the weather was good he worked late.
Here is how memory can deceive: I know perfectly well that in North Dakota the summer sun sets late, and for much of the season, darkness doesn’t descend until close to ten o’clock. I showed up at the swimming pool at around six—an hour when sunlight was unabated. Yet it seems to me that when I stepped out of the locker room and saw the lovely, voluptuous Miss Marie Ryan sitting on the concrete at the edge of the pool, she was washed in the golden light of the setting sun. Perhaps I misremember reality because of the way her tanned skin replied to the sun’s glow—and still more radiance caught in her hair, turned amber in that light. At the sight of her I must have gasped just as I had seconds earlier when I’d walked through the cold shower on my way out to the pool. So let’s allow this trick of memory to stand—it creates something truer than the inexpressive, unalterable fact of the hour and minute when the sun sinks below the horizon, and reminds us that we see with more than our eyes.
Marie’s swimsuit was the color of lime sherbet, and it didn’t have straps but a loop that circled her neck and left her sweet shoulders bare and unmarked. She was toweling the blond hair of a chunky sunburned little girl who was shouting an accusation of some sort at her brother, who was still in the water. The flesh of Marie’s back was as smooth and unblemished as the little girl’s. Marie didn’t see me approach, for which I was grateful. I wouldn’t have wanted her to scrutinize my gawky, sharp-shinned, long-boned pale body the way I examined hers.
As I squatted down next to her, I felt as though I were there merely to present a contrast in geometry—my abrupt angles alongside her luxuriant curves. I also noticed that though Marie was sitting at the pool’s shallow end, not all the footprints around her were child-size. Men and boys must have made up any excuse they could in order to walk out of the water near where she sat.
We couldn’t make anything but small talk with the little girl on her towel between us, but when the child fussed to go back into the water, I was only too glad to lead her by the hand and help her wade out to where her brother was trying to keep a beach ball submerged. Again and again it exploded back to the surface, and he acted shocked every time. His sister lent her weight to his, and while they worked on sinking the ball for good, I told Marie about what was on my mind.
“Has Gene said anything about that police detective hanging around all the time? His car is there almost every evening.”
She kept her eyes on her charges in the water, so I couldn’t glean much from her expression as she spoke.
“He thinks something is going on, all right. A few nights ago he came into the house through the side door, and his mother and Lee Mauer were sitting at the kitchen table. But side by side. And close. Gene thought maybe his mother rearranged her blouse when he walked in.”
I didn’t have to feign shock. “She’s fooling around with Lee Mauer? Her husband hasn’t been dead a year!”
“Gene doesn’t know that for sure. But he said that ever since then Mr. Mauer has been real buddy-buddy to him. He even asked Gene if he wanted to drive his police car.”
“Mrs. Stoddard and Lee Mauer? I can’t believe it!”
Marie obviously didn’t find it so hard to believe. She merely shrugged.
Our talk had turned frank enough that I could share with Marie my theory that Lee Mauer was trying to get close to Mrs. Stoddard because he thought that she, and pe
rhaps the Stoddard house itself, was holding back a secret that would explain why Raymond had behaved as he had.
This line of speculation didn’t particularly impress her either. She said matter-of-factly, “Men are always trying to see what they can get.” The knowing smile that Marie turned on me said that she knew this generalization could apply to me as well. I was flattered and chagrined to be one of her specimens, but she had me so neatly pinned I couldn’t do anything but sit and squirm.
When I finally found my tongue, I asked, “What does Gene think about all this?”
“He acts like he doesn’t care. His mother has her life, and he has his. That’s what he says, anyway. But he doesn’t like it. The house feels strange enough without having a stranger in it.”
I nodded eagerly. “That’s sort of what I thought. I’m hardly ever around the house anymore, though.”
Marie held me in her gaze. “Whose idea is that?”
When I didn’t answer, she released me. “He sure as hell doesn’t care about driving a police car.”
To cover my discomfort I stood and stepped into the pool, pretending as though the children’s play needed correction. Someone needed to show them what to do with a beach ball.
With my instruction and encouragement the kids eventually took to batting the ball back and forth rather than trying to drown it.
When I splashed out of the water, I found Marie was not alone. Standing over her, blocking her sun and probably trying to look down her swimsuit, was a lifeguard. I knew him, or at least knew his reputation. Tim Townley had just graduated from Bismarck High School and in the fall would be heading to St. Olaf to major in music and to compete on the college swim team. Slender, tanned, sun-bleached blond, and handsome, he had, so gossip had it, been successfully seducing the city’s girls for years. He usually targeted females a few years younger than himself, no doubt believing that they would be especially susceptible to the attentions of an older boy.
