The Center of Winter

by Marya Hornbacher

  Frank looked startled. “Hell, Claire. I known Arnold since we were kids. We were the same year at school.”

  That set me on my heels. “You’re joking.”

  “What, you thought I was older?” He grinned stupidly, and ruffled his silver-streaked hair. “Been like this since I was twenty-some. I tell everybody it’s from listening to their sorry tales at the bar.”

  I laughed, and he looked at the lake, alarmed.

  “You want another Coke?” I asked.

  “All right. If you’re sure you got enough.”

  I got us two and we watched the kids. “I guess you hear more than your fair share of sorry tales,” I said.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Somebody’s got to listen.”

  I nodded, not sure why that struck me as unspeakably sad.

  “I’ll say, though,” he confided. “Times, I feel like I know more than’s proper about folks.” He looked out over the beach. “I can look around, I know something about everybody. Them, them. Bump into somebody at the store, I know something I probably shouldn’t. I mean, how’s a person get any privacy around here?”

  “Small town,” I said. For some reason I wondered what he bought at the store. Beans, bananas, milk? Coffee? A little handheld basket.

  “Sure,” he agreed, nodding. “Sure, but. What’m I supposed to do with all that? All that knowing?”

  I lifted my head so I could see out from under my floppy hat. “Why, I don’t know,” I said.

  “Claire,” he said, sounding concerned, “that is a fine-looking hat.”

  “Thank you.” It was new. I adjusted the brim, embarassed.

  “Certainly. Nah, I don’t mind,” he went on. “Only time I mind is when I feel like something oughtta be done. A fella hits his wife, say. Well, next time he comes into the bar, I feel like I ought not to serve him. Ought to give him a piece of my mind.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I serve him and keep my mouth shut. Feel guilty as hell, but what’m I supposed to do? I’m not one to say what’s right or what’s what.”

  “I guess not,” I said. We sat there. I watched his feet. They were clean, pale from the ankles down. Like most folks around here. Tanned from the ankles to the thighs and from the bottoms of the shirtsleeves down to the hands.

  “Heh!” he said suddenly, like something had just occurred to him. “Don’t know why I’m bothering you with all this.”

  I shrugged. “You’re not bothering me.”

  “Sound like one of my own customers,” he said, grinning.

  “Somebody’s got to listen,” I said.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw him look at me. I felt like we had a secret. I flushed, confused.

  “Claire, honey, you two want a sandwich?” Donna leaned over. “It’s only bologna,” she said to Frank, “but Esau made enough to feed a church social, and somebody’s gotta eat ’em.” Jamie was munching on one already. I stood up and walked down to the water. “Kate! Esau! Davey! Lunch!” I called.

  Kate’s tiny red head bobbed like a buoy. She was a good swimmer but had a tendency to sink, she was so skinny. I pictured her little limbs flapping and kicking like hell underwater to stay afloat. “We’re busy!” she called. I shaded my eyes and watched a heated discussion take place between her and the two other drowned rats. “All right!” she amended.

  I turned back toward the picnic blanket just in time to see Frank watching me. He looked away and busied himself stuffing half a sandwich in his mouth. I trudged up the sand. Somehow, knowing his age made him look younger. He was younger than me. I was suddenly conscious of my bathing suit.

  “Apple?” Donna held one out. “Sandwich. Chips. My God, that boy packed your entire kitchen. What in the hell. There’s a whole chunk of cheese in here. And no damn knife.”

  Frank and Jamie simultaneously reached into their pockets and proffered hunting knives. If there was one thing you could count on a man for around here, it was that he’d have a knife and a handkerchief on his person.

  The kids arrived and flopped down in a wet heap, covering themselves with sand. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Donna and I both said, shooing them off the blanket and away from the food. They squirreled their way into the basket anyway, and made off with damp sandwiches, settling on their bellies and elbows like three beached seals.

  “Hello, Frank,” Esau said.

  “How’s by you, my friend?” Frank asked.

  “I’m well, thanks. We have identified three separate types of seaweed on the lake floor.”

  “And we saw a fish!” Kate yelped, so excited a bite of half-chewed sandwich fell out of her mouth.

  “Oh, ish,” I said, snatching it from under her head before she had a chance to pick it up.

  “A fish,” Frank said admiringly. “What sort?”

  “It was a northern!” she said.

  “No it wasn’t,” Davey muttered.

  “It was a crappie,” Esau corrected.

  “It was huge,” Kate crowed.

  “It was fairly large for a crappie,” Esau concurred. “As fish go, however, it was quite small.”

  “It had teeth,” she said, scowling.

  “It did not have teeth,” Esau said, stuffing the last bite of his sandwich in his mouth and getting another one out of the basket. “It lives on algae and microscopic life-forms.”

  “Shut up!” Kate said. “You are no fun.”

  Esau shrugged.

  “Anyway,” Davey said, delicately nibbling at the crusts of his sandwich, “it touched my leg.”

  None of them had an argument with that.

  “Who’s he?” Kate said, pointing at Jamie.

  “Well, ask him,” Donna said, exasperated.

  “Who’re you?”

  “Kate,” I chided.

  “What?”

  “Name’s Jamie,” he said, touching his baseball cap with his fingers and putting out his hand. Kate shook his hand seriously.

  “Who are you and what do you want?” Esau asked.

  “Esau!” I said. Frank and Jamie laughed.

  “My dad died,” Kate said amiably, peeling the top slice of Wonder Bread off her sandwich and licking the mayonnaise off the bologna.

  We sat there. Only Davey didn’t pause. He reached into the bag of chips and munched loudly.

  “Is that so,” Jamie said.

  Kate nodded. “When I was six.”

  “She’s seven now,” Davey explained. “So am I.”

  “It’s good to be seven,” Frank said thoughtfully.

  “We like it,” Davey said. Kate nodded.

  “Well, all I can say is, the three of you are burnt to a crisp,” Donna said. “More lotion when you’re done eating.”

  “And no swimming for half an hour,” I said.

  “That,” said Esau, sitting up and wiping each of his fingers on a napkin with extreme care, “was a complete non sequitur.”

  He glowed with the use of his new word. None of us knew what it meant, so we ignored it. At times his vocabulary troubled me.

  “And,” he said haughtily—he was in fine form today—“there is absolutely positively no scientific basis for the belief that consumption prior to aquatic submersion is in anyway detrimental to one’s health.”

  With that, he turned on his heel and loped across the sand, walking upright into the water until he disappeared.

  Kate ate the red parts off her apple and handed Davey the rest. He buried it in the sand.

  Abruptly and without speaking, the two of them stood up and departed for the swings.

  Jamie looked at me. “Is your kid some kind of genius?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. The idea made me tired.

  “He reads the encyclopedia,” Donna said. “I think he’s trying to memorize it.”

  “Is he?” I asked. I leaned back on my elbows and buried my toes in the warm sand. “Great. Pretty soon we won’t understand a word he says.” I pulled my hat down over my eyes and laid back to bask in th
e sun.

  With a little more awkward small talk and an ungraceful scramble to their feet, Frank and Jamie, brushing sand from their rear ends and tapping their hat brims, took off. Donna flopped down next to me. I flipped the brim of my hat up to look at her.

  “Why do you always look better in my clothes than I do?” I asked.

  She snorted. “Matter of opinion.”

  “Jamie shares it.”

  “Yeah, well. I’m not married to Jamie, am I?”

  “Shame.”

  “It is a shame. It’s a damn shame. Oh, Lord, but that boy is good-looking.”

  I said nothing.

  “Quit with that,” she said.

  “What?”

  “That disapproving.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Didn’t have to.”

  I lay there.

  “Wasn’t like I ran off with him,” she said reproachfully.

  “What in the hell,” I said, sitting up. “I didn’t say anything! What do I care?”

  She muttered something.

  “What?” I asked, not sure I’d heard.

  “He tried to hit me.” She studied her nails, bright coral pink. “Last night.”

  I stared at her. She lay on her stomach, her bosom spilling perfectly over the top of my baggy bathing suit. Well, it was baggy on me.

  “What for?” I asked.

  She glared at me. “What do you mean, what for? What’s it matter, what the fuck for?” She looked back at her nails and pushed at the cuticle of her thumb.

  “Sorry,” I said stupidly.

  “S’all right. Sorry I yelled.”

  “You didn’t yell.”

  “Well, not yelled, but you know what I mean.”

  “Did you get in the first punch?” I tried to joke. She tried to laugh.

  “Yeah. Bloodied his nose.”

  “Well, that’s something.”

  “Yeah.” She lay down with her face on her arms. I watched the lake. The kids were jumping off a raft over and over and over. How it could still be fun after that many jumps, I didn’t know.

  “He just got crazy, is all,” she said, her voice muffled. “Doesn’t say a damn thing for weeks, and just when I think he’s gone and died down there in the basement, he comes hauling up, plum crazy. I don’t know which of us is crazy. Who starts it. Winds up so we’re both crazy and throwing shit and I don’t know what all.”

  A brief, cool breeze skimmed over us and disappeared, rippling the water from south to north, then letting it go still.

  “Davey saw,” she said, so softly I almost thought she hadn’t spoken. She waited for me to answer, but I didn’t know what to say.

  “That,” she said. She tapped her finger in the sand, as if pointing at something, a specific thing. “That’s too much.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I opened another Coke. “What’d Davey do?”

  She turned her face so that she was looking away from me. “Didn’t see him at first, tell you the truth. That’s what gets me. We were so busy screaming we didn’t hear him. And I’m trying to think, how’d that happen? I’m trying to think, his bed squeaks, the hallway floor makes all that noise, the stairs, the door, and how come we didn’t hear him?”

  I didn’t know. I remembered that awful moment, though. When you turn and see your child staring at you like you’re a monster and you have no idea how long they’ve been watching or what they saw or how long it’ll be till they forget, if they ever do.

  “So what’d he do?” I asked again.

  She sighed and sat up. She sat slumped, looking out at the lake. “Ran over to his father and hit him with a poker.”

  “What?”

  She nodded grimly. “Grabbed himself the poker from beside the fireplace. Must’ve been standing there with it awhile. Soon as Dale came after me, Davey pops up from out of nowhere and starts swinging this poker at Dale’s knees.” Her face shifted and she tried not to smile. “Tell you, it was a sight. This little kid in his pajamas, swinging this thing around”—she started to laugh—“but it’s too damn heavy, and pretty soon it’s swinging him, and he fell over.” She sighed. “Got one good crack in, though. Put Dale’s left knee right out, and that’s his good one too. Serves the sonofabitch right.”

  “He hit Davey?”

  “Tried to. That’s when I bloodied his nose.”

  We watched Tabatha Hendricks leap up from her blanket, hike her skirt up, and stride without stopping hip deep into the water, screaming at all four of her children to get here right this minute before she came to get them her damn self.

  “Tell you the truth, wasn’t really a fair fight,” Donna said. “He was drunk as a deacon on holiday. Didn’t see me throw the punch.”

  “Yeah, well,” I snorted.

  Tabatha walked out of the water, stripped down to her underwear, and walked right back in. She emerged with two kids by their hair and went back for the other two.

  “You know what’s crazy?” Donna said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Mothers.”

  “Oh honey. Tell me.” We laughed. I thought of my mother. Oh, darling, she’d said. You can’t protect a child. Or did she say save? You can’t save a child? I watched Kate burst through the surface of the water with her face lifted, gasping for air.

  “Thought I’d have to kill him,” she said calmly. “When he went for Davey.”

  “Yeah,” I finally said. “Yeah, you probably would.”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t think twice.”

  She eased herself down onto her elbows. “Shit, Claire. What’re we gonna do?”

  I nodded slowly. “You could leave him.”

  She said nothing.

  “You’re the one who mentioned it,” I reminded her.

  “Didn’t mean it,” she said.

  “Sure you did.”

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t. I don’t have the balls. You know that.”

  “Oh, for Chrissakes.”

  “No one gets divorced around here. What am I gonna be, the town home wrecker? Walking around like some fancy divorcée? No thank you.”

  I laughed. “It could be worse. You could be me.”

  She giggled. “Nah, you’re the town heathen. When’re you gonna go to church, anyway? It looks bad. Give me a cigarette.”

  I pulled the pack out of my purse and lit hers and my own. For three blissful seconds, we were just ladies sunning ourselves on the beach with not a care in the world.

  Then we exhaled.

  She looked at me. “Claire, I got two kids. You’re outta your mind.”

  “I’ve got two kids too,” I said, shrugging.

  “It’s different.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What are you doing this for, Claire? You know it’s different.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Jesus Mary, you’re as dim as they come, I swear to God. You didn’t leave your husband, if you’ll recall.”

  “I was going to.”

  She blinked, gazing at the lake. Then she lifted her cigarette to her mouth again and took a drag. She exhaled through her nose like a lovely dragon.

  “Beg pardon?” she said politely.

  “I said, I was going to.”

  “That so.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’d thought it through?”

  I blew smoke upward and watched it climb toward the lower branches of the tree. “For years. Off and on. Then on. Every time I looked at him, I thought, Leave.”

  We sat there quietly for a long time.

  “Well, he did,” she finally said.

  That hung in the air between us.

  Slowly, I turned to look at her. “Did you just say that to me?”

  She didn’t return my gaze. “No,” she said.

  “I didn’t think so.”

  We waited while it blew over.

  “Did he know you were gonna go?”

  “Yes he did.”

  The night in
the living room. I sat on the couch, he sat at the edge of his chair. Holding our coffee cups. My tongue working in my mouth, trying to form the words. I don’t want you. No. I’m leaving. No. Go.

  No.

  “That’s why,” I said.

  She looked at me, puzzled.

  “That’s why he did it.” I dropped my cigarette. She grabbed it and handed it to me. It had burned a hole through the blanket already. The smoke scribbled weird writing on the still air.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “That night,” I said. “That’s why he killed himself. That night. That’s why he killed himself that night,” I shouted, and gasped. My hands flew up to my mouth. People turned to stare, then looked away.

  “Did they hear?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, sitting up and taking the cigarette away from my face. “Did they hear what I said?”

  “No, Claire.” She put my cigarette out in the sand and took my hands. She squeezed them. “Okay. That’s all right.”

  “They know.”

  “No, they don’t know anything. Bunch of busybodies. Just some noise, turned to look.”

  “Where are the kids?” I squinted out at the lake.

  “There,” she said. “And there, and there’s Esau. Okay?”

  “Okay.” I lit another cigarette and took a deep drag and choked. I tried again. “All right, then,” I said, calmer.

  “Good.”

  “You know, I drank too much.” I smoked so fast I was dizzy. “At first. When he died.”

  “That’s sensible.”

  “You remember how much I drank at first?” I shook my head. “Poor Katie. Always waking up, seeing me like that.”

  “She won’t remember, honey.”

  “Won’t remember when? When do they forget?”

  She rubbed my back. “You’re getting burnt,” she said. “Let me put some lotion on.”

  I sat with my arms around my knees while she pointlessly put lotion on my back. “When? Do you think?” I asked.

  “Don’t know,” she said. “That one, I can’t answer.”

  I wanted to tell her Kate saw the bedroom. But I didn’t know if she saw. And if I told her Kate saw, then it would be true, and then my life would be over.

  When you get married, you think it would kill you to lose him. Because that’s the worst thing you can imagine. But then you have children, and you know you were wrong. You find out that the worst thing that could happen is that your children could be hurt.