The Center of Winter

by Marya Hornbacher

  I nodded, glum.

  Doc Parker reached for his bag.

  “I don’t want a shot,” I whimpered.

  “Aw, you know it’s just a little bite,” the doctor said, rolling his sleeves up and taking out a small vial. He turned it slowly upside down, watching the clear liquid turn opaque. “And ain’t no other way to get you to sleep just now, do you think? Think you’re wound pretty tight, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes. Fairly tight. Are you going to send me to State?” I stopped breathing and watched him draw the medicine up into the barrel of the syringe.

  “Course not, kiddo. Few days, you’ll be right as rain. Wanna pull that pajama top off?” he asked. “Ladies, if you don’t mind stepping out,” he said to Mom, Donna, and Kate.

  They filed out of the room and I pulled my Spiderman pajama top off.

  “Want to get in bed first?” the doctor asked.

  I nodded. He got up out of the closet and waited for me to get in bed.

  “Want I should roll you up?” he asked. “Might sleep a little easier, do you think?”

  “Yes please.”

  He rolled me in the quilt so I was in a cocoon to sleep.

  “Arm,” he said. I wriggled my arm out.

  “Night, kiddo,” he said. “Sleep tight.”

  He laid his hand on my forehead and I felt the sting and then I was falling backward into sleep.

  I slept most of the day and nodded off during dinner with a bite of hamburger in my mouth. Kate and Davey were elaborately quiet. I knew from before that everyone would be quiet for a few days while I slept. I curled up next to Mom on the couch and we watched TV. Just when I felt my head falling forward again, I jerked awake and said, “Is Frank going to kiss you?” I gazed straight ahead at the television set.

  Mom pulled some lint out of my hair. “I don’t know. Not if you don’t want him to.”

  “Do you want him to?”

  Kate and Davey looked up from their matchbox cars, curious.

  Carefully, like she was tiptoeing, Mom said, “I don’t like this line of conversation.”

  I nodded. “Oh.” I kept looking at the TV. “Well, do you? Want him to kiss you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You can tell us.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Oh.” I thought that over. “I guess you don’t have to.”

  We watched The Tonight Show. Kate and Davey laughed along with the laugh track, like they were singing the chorus to a song.

  “I might not be a scientist-inventor,” I said, tucking my hands between my knees and folding my legs onto the couch. “I might be an architect-librarian.”

  “That’s a fine idea.”

  “I think so too. Do you want to know my logic? This is my logic,” I said. “First, I could design the library just exactly to how I want it and then it would be mine. If I had a whole library, I could know everything about everything and not just everything about a few things. And I could organize the books. And I like to do that. And by the time I had read all of the books, there would be more books to read.”

  “It’s true.”

  “I like Frank. But he can’t have you.”

  Mom was quiet for a minute. Then she said, “He doesn’t have me.”

  “But he is around now.”

  Kate and Davey ran their matchbox cars back and forth over the same patch of carpet, listening.

  “More than he was before, which was not at all, so statistically speaking he is around more, by definition,” I prompted.

  “If you put it that way.”

  “So we will have to adjust our routine.”

  She looked at me. “I guess, a little.”

  “A lot. A very large lot. Did you know that if a butterfly dies it affects the entire ecosystem of a rain forest in South America?”

  “No.”

  I nodded. “Systems are fragile.” I turned my face up to her. “Systems are simultaneously very strong and very fragile.” I turned back to the television, satisfied. “That is my favorite paradox,” I said.

  CLAIRE

  A few weeks after Esau’s episode, on a cold December morning, the phone woke me up. I slammed my hand around on the nightstand trying to find it with my eyes closed and only succeeded in dropping it on Donna’s head where she lay in her nest on the floor.

  “Jesus Christ,” she yelled, and picked up the phone. “’Lo!”

  The phone came flying up onto the bed. “It’s for you,” she mumbled. “Tell them to go away.”

  Donna and the kids had been staying with us for a week, in the wake of another fight. This time, she swore she wasn’t going back.

  I put the phone next to my ear and shifted in the sheets. “Hello,” I said.

  “Morning,” said Frank. My eyes snapped open.

  “Morning,” I said, not wanting to move in case he could hear the sheets and then picture me in bed. Somehow that was very important.

  “You said I could call.”

  “I did.” I had. I had not expected him to call while I was in my nightgown.

  “So I’m calling.” I would’ve sworn I could hear him regret it.

  “Who the hell is it?” Donna asked.

  “What are you doing tonight?” he asked.

  “Um. No plans, really.”

  “I’d like to make you dinner. If you’re free. If you’d like.”

  This called for a pause. This was an invitation to his home. This was a whole new level of something. “You cook?” I finally said.

  “Is that Frank?” Donna asked. “What the hell time is it?”

  “I do cook,” Frank said. “I cook pretty well, I guess. You wouldn’t starve, at any rate.”

  “Hang on a sec,” I said, and put the phone under a pillow. I leaned over the side of the bed. Donna was lying there with her hands behind her head, wide awake. She smiled.

  “It’s Frank,” I said. “He wants to know if I can come over for dinner tonight.”

  “Are you serious? To his house?”

  “Yes! What should I tell him?”

  “Well, shit!” She sat up and crossed her legs. “What are you going to wear?”

  “I don’t know! Should I even go?”

  She thought about it. “Well, what the hell. Why not. But what do we do with the kids?”

  I stared at her.

  “I was going to see Jamie,” she said, wincing.

  “Please don’t tell me that.”

  “Well—”

  “Please tell me you’re joking.”

  “We can drop the kids with your folks.”

  “No we cannot! They are our kids! Oh, I can’t even tell you how pissed I am at you right now.” I flopped back onto the bed and put the phone to my ear. We would drop them at Oma and Opa’s. They’d be delighted.

  “Frank?”

  “Right here.”

  “Sorry. What time should I come by?”

  “Oh!” It seemed he hadn’t thought that far. “Six? Seven?”

  “Six.”

  “Okay. Great.”

  “Want me to bring anything?”

  “No no no no. I’ve got it all under control. Good. All right then. See you at six.”

  He hung up. I put the phone down and leaned over the edge of the bed.

  “What am I doing?” I asked Donna.

  “Going on a date.”

  “Going on a date to his house. That’s something different.” I paused. “More to the point, what are you doing?”

  She wrinkled her nose in thought. “I need coffee to answer that.” She got up and went out to the kitchen.

  I lay in bed staring out the upside-down window. What to wear, what to wear, what to wear.

  She came back in, handed me a cup of coffee, and settled herself at the foot of the bed. “Figured it out,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Leaving him.”

  We drank our coffee.

  “Okay,” I said, nodding. “Honey, don’t go see Ja
mie tonight.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Don’t,” I repeated.

  She was looking out the window. “Sleeting,” she said. “Gonna be icy.” She looked at me. “I have to,” she said.

  “Goddamn, but you are stubborn.”

  She grinned. “I know.”

  “Stubborn and stupid,” I said, getting out of bed.

  I dropped the kids at Oma and Opa’s and drove back into town. Now Oma would feed them sugar enough to choke a horse, and bring them home at midnight when they were asleep.

  I was mortified by Opa’s little wink.

  Then I sat in front of Frank’s house, fixing my hair in the rearview mirror and talking myself out of the car.

  I liked him. I did. I must have. I liked him enough to be sitting like a teenage girl in my car, fixing my hair and fussing with my plastic pearls. You didn’t just go to a man’s house for dinner for a casual date. You were agreeing to something, by going to his house, you were not preventing inevitable things such as talk, or possibly kissing. I was agreeing to these things. Though he was quiet, and patient, and not what I was used to, foreign, and at the same time becoming all too familiar, uncomfortably familiar, as if on purpose, and he tended bar and had unruly eyebrows, and probably there were numerous other things I did not know about him yet but would not like, nevertheless, I liked him. He felt comfortable to me. Like I could lean into him for a while and rest.

  I opened the car door and smoothed down my skirt.

  He must have known I was out there, because I had only lifted my hand to knock when he flung the door open and said, “Come in! Sit down! I’m just finishing up,” and he ushered me into the kitchen.

  I had never seen a kitchen so clean. Not just-cleaned-this-afternoon clean. Empty clean. Bachelor clean. On the counter, in a row, were a silver toaster and silver tins for flour, coffee, sugar, and salt. They gleamed, and were possibly only there to fill space. There was no basket of browning fruit, no onion skins, no piles of mail. Just a little row of Schilling’s spices to the left of the stove, all caps neatly on. No dishes in the sink. All four burners burbled. It smelled wonderful.

  “Just a little something,” he said, lifting a lid and stirring. He wiped his hands on the towel that dangled from the waistband of his jeans. “What can I get you? Red wine? White? Or I stopped by Y-Knot and got a little of your favorite,” he crowed, and produced a bottle of Black Label from the cupboard above the fridge.

  “Frank!” I said. “This is too much!”

  “My house. I can do what I like.” He dropped an ice cube into a glass and poured a splash over it, cracking the ice. He handed it to me.

  He didn’t let go of the glass. I looked at him. “Welcome,” he said, and leaned in to kiss my cheek.

  I knew something like this would happen. I had been kissed. I had been there less than five minutes and already I had been kissed for the first time in a year.

  He flushed and turned back to the stove, humming.

  I found myself dipping my tongue into the scotch, staring at his broad back.

  For the first time in a year. I had not been kissed by a man, even on the cheek, since my husband died. Who was no longer my husband, because he had died. Who had died, thus flinging open the door that led to being kissed on the cheek by a man, in that man’s kitchen, in that man’s home, in which there was likely a bed.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” he said, waving a wooden spoon. “Have a look around.” Gratefully, I broke my too intent stare at his back.

  There was music playing in another room, and the kitchen table was set. Two brand-new candles sat unlit in their wooden holders. He’d used napkin rings. Where on earth, I thought, did this man come up with napkin rings?

  Through the kitchen doorway there was a dining room he’d turned into a little study, with a desk in the corner facing out onto his lawn. I peered through the screen. Mulch covered a vegetable garden for winter, and his fence was overgrown with ivy that flickered in the heavy sleet that was turning to snow.

  It had not snowed since a lifetime before, when Arnold was my husband and absentmindedly kissed my cheek. I would lean over his game of solitaire on my way to bed. He would glance up, not even with his eyes, just with his face, and kiss my cheek. Then he would go back to his game.

  I had missed this nightly ritual for so long I had forgotten when I had forgotten to miss it.

  I looked away from the window.

  Through a wide arch, the living room had a set of red velvet furniture, antique, the kind my mother would have killed for. He’d painted the room a darker red, and it was lit by low yellow lamps with stained-glass shades. He’d set out an ashtray, though he didn’t smoke. The candy dish was full. And there were flowers, dusty pink roses, in a vase. In the corner, a phonograph spun. On the mantel, a Bible, the kind in which you record the family tree: gilt edged, enormous, in an ebony stand. I walked over to it. It was open to the Psalms.

  I pictured him standing there at five to six, looking around the room, looking for a flower out of place, a picture hung wrong.

  I glanced up the wide, curved staircase. A light illuminated a hat rack in the corner at the top of the stairs, with his caps and hats. They were the only sign anyone really lived here at all.

  And yet the house was filled with him. He emanated quietly from the kitchen. I could feel him listening to my steps.

  The kiss on my cheek had in truth been quite close to my mouth.

  He joined me in the hallway. “Go on up,” he said.

  “Oh, that’s all right.”

  “No, really. I want to show you.”

  I looked at him and started up the stairs. “Here,” he said, taking my elbow and guiding me into a room. “Look.”

  He left his hand on my arm longer than was necessary as I took in the room.

  Bookshelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling, books stacked two and three deep, laid on their sides atop each other. In the corner, there was a fat leather armchair with a stained-glass window above it, bookshelves built into the wall above that. The lamp above the chair cast colors from the stained glass in patterns over the wood floor.

  I thought of the stained-glass window in the church. When Arnold had died and I had looked away from his coffin and through the glass window that shot jewel colors over Kate’s face as if she were a harlequin doll.

  I was in Frank’s church.

  “I was thinking,” he said, striding across the room, “maybe Esau could find a thing or two he’d like in here.” He pulled a book off the shelf to show me, then set his drink down on a towering stack of books, put on a pair of reading glasses that had sat on the arm of the chair, and tilted his head to the side, pulling books out and handing them to me faster than I could keep up.

  I studied his profile in the lamplight, the glasses perched on the tip of his broad nose. I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of books, the knowledge they implied, the fact that I was here in the room to which he clearly retreated each day. His refuge. I felt I ought to close my eyes to the nakedness to which he had stripped himself down. All these months, waiting patiently for me, never forcing me to look. But constantly letting me know that I could.

  I wanted to look. I wanted to show him a refuge of my own. I wanted to tell him my secrets, whatever they were. I opened my mouth to speak but did not know what to say.

  I watched his wide brown hands cradle a heavy book as you would an infant’s head. He studied the page, perhaps having forgotten I was there.

  “How many books—do you have?” I finally asked, feeling stupid.

  “Three thousand and change.” He shrugged, closing the book and setting it on a shelf. “I collect them. I thought Esau might like it.”

  “He’ll think he’s died and gone to heaven.” To my relief, the moment passed.

  Frank laughed. We stood there for a minute. “I collect buttons too,” he said, and cleared his throat. “But I don’t enjoy that nearly as much.”

  I laughed.
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  He looked at me, smiling. “What?”

  “You just look so pleased with yourself.” I went over to the bookcase and pulled out a volume. I paged through it. “Never figured you for a reader,” I said lightly, trying to release some strange tension that had crept into the room.

  “No, I don’t suppose.”

  “Why’s that?” I looked at him.

  He shrugged and wrinkled his brow. “Well, don’t suppose you figured me for much of anything a’tall.”

  I smiled at the book. “That’s not true.”

  “Huh.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Probably had me figured for some illiterate,” he said. It was hard to tell when he was joking. “City girl like you? Backwoods bartender, that’s all I was.”

  I laughed. “So what do you know? Tell me something you know.” I shut the book.

  He pushed his hands into his pockets, thinking. “I know my Shakespeare pretty good.”

  “Oh yeah?” I laughed. “Tell me some.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Is this a quiz?”

  “Yes.” I was flirting. I’m flirting, I thought, alarmed.

  “‘Be not afeared,’” he intoned abruptly. “‘The isle is full of noises, sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices that, if I then had waked after long sleep will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming, the clouds methought would open and show riches ready to drop upon me, that, when I waked, I cried to dream again.’”

  I stared at him. I wanted him to keep talking. He smiled. I took a swallow of my drink. It made my face burn. “That was pretty,” I said.

  “And I know a few other things too.”

  “Yeah?” I smiled into my drink.

  “Yeah.” Now we were definitely flirting.

  “Is that your big secret?” I asked, looking up. “That you’re not really a bartender, you’re a secret book reader and a, a button collector? Hiding away up here in your room?”

  He shook his head. “Nope,” he said, smiling. “That’s not it.”

  “What is it?”

  “Time to eat,” he announced, and turned down the hall. “Come on.”