The Weight of Winter

by Cathie Pelletier

  “Hello there,” the girl said, and stepped a bit closer to the kitchen warmth that had rushed out the open door. A wind was sweeping around the chimney, leaking its way beneath her collar, and she obviously wished to avoid it.

  “Come on in,” said Amy Joy, “and get out of that wind.” The girl reached for a small bag that had been resting near her feet, a tan grip Amy Joy had not noticed, and stepped quickly into the warm kitchen. Sicily would’ve claimed this girl might be a Moonie, but some things had yet to reach the Mattagash town line by 1989 and Moonies were among them. Winters in Maine were far too cold for selling roses on roadways, or for the bare bald pates of Hare Krishnas. Religion had its own sense of geography.

  Amy Joy shut the kitchen door on the cold and turned to appraise her visitor.

  “It’s nippy out there,” the girl said, and rubbed her red hands together. “I walked from the grocery store.” It occurred to Amy Joy that, of course, there was no vehicle sitting outside in the yard.

  “From Marshall’s Grocery?” Amy Joy asked. This was the new grocery, built back after Betty’s fire in 1975, and run by her son-in-law. But it was almost three miles away.

  “It’s not too bad until the wind blows,” the girl said. “It’s a short ways, really.” She did not have the Mattagash brogue in her speech, Amy Joy noticed, but an out-of-town sort of accent. She had assumed that this was some young Fennelson, or Craft, or Monihan, out selling tickets for a chicken stew supper or a handmade quilt. Hadn’t she seen her somewhere before? One could usually recognize a family resemblance in the youngsters of town, their eyes, their noses, their foreheads. Mattagash lines held well, with kids always looking like newer, pictures of their parents. Yet Amy Joy couldn’t quite place those familiar eyes, that small aquiline nose, that broad forehead.

  “Well?” Amy Joy said. “Is there something I can do for you?”

  “I’m Miranda Fletcher,” the girl said, then waited. Fletcher. That was not a Mattagash name.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to tell me more,” Amy Joy said. “I just can’t place you.”

  “Cynthia’s daughter,” Miranda explained.

  “Cynthia?”

  “Cynthia Ivy from Portland. Your cousin Junior’s daughter. Junior is my grandfather.” Amy Joy said nothing for long, full seconds. Of course, now she could easily place the eyes, the proud nose, the queenlike brow. It was like looking at a young Pearl McKinnon, at any McKinnon from out of the old family scrapbooks. As a matter of fact, there was more McKinnon in the girl’s face than ever could be found in Amy Joy’s own mixture of McKinnon and Lawler. There was more of the McKinnon face in Miranda Fletcher than there was in Sicily McKinnon. This was Pearl, this little girl, not stocky yet, not big-shouldered, but those haunting features, the proud flip of her head as she spoke. Except for the accent, it was as if she had just stepped off the ship from the old country, from the days when cultures and religions married within their own kind, held their own lines well, as though they were castles or battlefronts. This was the face before the McKinnons married into the Mullins camp, the Crafts, the Lawlers, the Ivys. Pearl McKinnon Ivy’s great-granddaughter!

  “I’ll be darned,” said Amy Joy. “No wonder you looked like someone I should know.” Amy Joy had known that Pearl had great-grandchildren somewhere. The token birth notices had winged up the state over the years, but they had been filed away in some drawer or under some plate in the cupboard and forgotten.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t call first,” Miranda said, “but I was hitchhiking and I didn’t really have any loose change.”

  “What?” Amy Joy was sure she must be mistaken. “Hitchhiking? From where? From Marshall’s Grocery?”

  “No,” the girl said. “From Portland. I walked from the grocery store.” She was shivering, her long thin fingers still weaving themselves together, still seeking warmth.

  “Oh, listen to me,” Amy Joy chided herself, “asking you questions while you’re standing there freezing to death. Take your coat off and stand over the register. That’s not a hardwood heat coming out of there—it’s gas. But it’s still nice and hot.”

  “A what heat?” Miranda asked. Shed of her coat, she was thinner than Amy Joy had imagined, and taller—as tall, she could see now, as the McKinnons, majestic almost with her sure, swift movements.

  “A heat that comes from burning wood,” Amy Joy explained. “From a wood stove. Don’t people you know have wood stoves in Portland? I thought they were all the rage again among city folks who never grew up with them.”

  “A friend of mine has one,” Miranda said. “It’s at her father’s lake camp, though. They burn some kind of tree in it.”

  “Are you hungry?” Amy Joy asked, and Miranda shook her head.

  “Did your car break down? Is that why you’re hitchhiking?” Again the response was negative. “Well, the water’s hot for tea. Surely a nice cup of tea will warm you up a bit.”

  Miranda stood on the warm register, her thick, dark hair, the younger Pearl McKinnon’s hair, floating about her shoulders like wavy water. Amy Joy wondered if anyone had ever told Miranda how much she looked like Pearl. She put a cup of tea on one of the place mats on the kitchen table and then motioned for Miranda to sit. What in the world was the girl doing here, at the other end of the state from Portland, wearing what looked like hiking boots?

  “You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here,” Miranda said, and put sugar in her tea, a practice frowned upon in Mattagash.

  “I guess you can say that,” Amy Joy said.

  “I’m here—” Miranda said, and paused. “Could I have a sandwich? I guess I am hungry.”

  “Cynthia Jane’s daughter,” Amy Joy said as she made a quick cheese sandwich. “I’ll be darned.” She had seen her second cousin Cynthia Jane Ivy three times—at Marge McKinnon’s funeral, at Marvin Ivy’s funeral, and at Pearl’s funeral—and it was enough to make Amy Joy hope that everyone else they knew mutually would end up immortal. Cynthia Jane suffered from what she herself termed “long-waistedness” and was forever cranking clothing down out of her privates.

  “How is your mother?” Amy Joy asked.

  “Busy at the moment,” Miranda answered. “She’s living several lives, and one of them happens to be mine.”

  “Ah,” said Amy Joy. “I see.” It was beginning to fall together the way pages of an old family scrapbook should. Blood will out.

  “And your uncle Randy?” Amy Joy put the sandwich on a plate and passed it to Miranda, who was watching the snow swirl outside the window. Marvin Randall Ivy III had terrorized Mattagash during his last visit, bringing with him both marijuana and a severe case of Phthirius pubis, the latter affecting a much larger portion of town than the former. When Randy failed to appear for Pearl’s funeral in 1987, Junior Ivy had announced that his son was on some special mission from God, in some steaming tent in the middle of Africa.

  “I hope they got blue ointment there,” was all Kevin Craft had said. “Otherwise, I pity them poor natives.”

  “Uncle Randy’s still preaching,” said Miranda. “Saving African souls. Married to a saint. Has saints for kids. His pets are saints too. At least, if you listen to Grandpa Junior talk about him.”

  “That’s Randy, all right,” said Amy Joy, and smiled.

  “And Aunt Regina is still a bookworm and is married to a bookworm. They’re both too bookwormy to have children.” Amy Joy smiled again. She couldn’t remember what Regina Beth had done at Marge’s funeral, but she had read through Marvin’s and Pearl’s.

  “Does your mother know where you are?” she asked.

  “Not exactly,” Miranda said, then: “No, she doesn’t.” Not one to mince words, Amy Joy noticed. She had more than the sturdy dark looks of her great-grandmother. She had the old McKinnon backbone.

  “You’ve run away then?” Amy Joy pushed a jar of dill pickles closer to Miranda’s plat
e.

  “Not really,” Miranda said. “I was eighteen last week. It isn’t that it’s illegal or anything.”

  “Where does your mother think you are?”

  “Somewhere on the streets of Portland, I suppose,” said Miranda. She decided against the dill pickle and pushed the bottle away again with her slender fingers. McKinnon fingers! Amy Joy thought. How often had Sicily remarked on the potential musical genius that lay dormant in those magical fingers of Ralph McKinnon’s three daughters after Flora Gumble, grammar school teacher and pianist extraordinaire, died back in the 1920s. “A lot of raw McKinnon talent went down the drain that day,” Sicily liked to note sadly, staring at her hands.

  “I don’t want to sound impolite,” Amy Joy said. “But we don’t even know each other. I’m curious as to what you are doing up here.”

  “It’s the last place she’d look for me,” Miranda explained. She scooped her shiny, dark hair back from her face with both hands, making a temporary ponytail, then let her hair fall freely once again. How did it happen? How did kids learn things from people they’d never even met? Amy Joy wondered. She had seen Pearl, a million times, scoop all her heavy gray hair into a ponytail, a girlish gesture really, and then as fast as she’d made the thing, she’d throw all that hair to the winds again. Amy Joy had watched a special on TV once that talked about just such things, about male twins being separated at birth but thirty years later driving the same cars, wearing the same style clothes, the same horn-rimmed glasses, enjoying the same hobbies, both married to women named Julie. And she knew how little boys who’d never seen their fathers walked like them, slung their arms the same way, held their heads as though they belonged to their grandfathers.

  “I don’t care what Eppie Hart tells the world,” Winnie once said as she and Sicily rocked on the back porch, “but that child walks and talks just like Henry Fennelson because that child belongs to Henry Fennelson. Did you ever know a Fennelson that didn’t kind of spring up a bit on their left leg as they walked? That child has the Fennelson gait, I don’t care if it does have Howard Hart’s name.” And here at Amy Joy’s kitchen table, with another November storm trying desperately to happen, with wet flakes beating down at the Mattagash River, at the slopes of McKinnon Hill, at the old McKinnon homestead, another generation was using the same old-settler blood to keep alive, was making useless ponytails, was tapping fingers long as batons on the thick cherry of Amy Joy’s handmade table.

  “My mother hates Mattagash, Maine,” Miranda said.

  “That I do know,” said Amy Joy, recalling all three of Cynthia Jane’s visits. Even for folks who did happen to have bright and sunny dispositions, funerals were not camping trips.

  “So I figured that if Mother hates it so much, it can’t be all that bad,” Miranda went on. Her face had warmed itself again, was blush-colored now, had beaten the storm. “We’ve never agreed on anything since day one.”

  “Still,” said Amy Joy. She paused to listen as the wind picked up fiercely off the river, then died away again. “You’re going to have to call her. She’ll be worried sick.”

  “I doubt it,” said Miranda. “Why is it so difficult for people to understand that some parents just don’t like their kids and would prefer not to have them around? It happens, you know.”

  “I’m sure she’ll be worried,” Amy Joy said, although it was easy to imagine the long-waisted Cynthia Jane more concerned with short-waisted pantyhose than with a runaway daughter. “It’s common for mothers and daughters to squabble.” She thought suddenly of Sicily, her own mother, the Squabbler Divine.

  “We’ve been really fighting since I graduated from high school last spring,” Miranda said. She had cleaned each of the tiny bread crumbs off her plate as she talked, slowly wetting a finger and snagging each one. Amy Joy watched her thoughtfully. “She and Daddy won’t help me with college unless I go to the one they picked. And besides, I don’t want to go for a couple of years. I want to travel around Europe first, Canada, Mexico.” Amy Joy’s breath caught for a second in her chest. “How wonderful it must be to be that brave,” she told herself.

  “It’s not a good school?” Amy Joy asked Miranda. She had to stop her from reeling the poetic names of the world off her tongue so easily. Wasn’t she even a little afraid?

  “It’s an all-girls college,” Miranda said. “And I’ve got bigger plans than that.” She was done with the crumbs and began to rattle the saltshaker softly against the pepper. Pearl’s nervousness, too. Amy Joy remembered Sicily reaching over one morning, during breakfast, and taking a spoon out of Pearl’s large hand. The tap tap tapping had been driving Sicily and Amy Joy crazy.

  “And what are those plans?” Amy Joy asked, listening to the irritating tinkle of the little glass shakers.

  “I’m going to be an artist,” said Miranda as Amy Joy stared at her hands and wondered if any superb concertos were lying dormant in those long, piano fingers.

  ***

  “Mama?” Amy Joy whispered to Sicily. Sicily had fallen asleep in the TV lounge in front of Cocoon, the rental movie for that Saturday. Patrice Grandmaison must’ve thought it would cheer the seniors up to watch a film in which others of their ilk fared so spectacularly. But Hollywood scripts with aliens who could make you young again only depressed the more realistic Mattagash senior citizens. Most of them had left the room even before Sicily fell asleep.

  “What is it?” Sicily said, sitting up. She rubbed her eyes. “Did all them old fools go to Mars yet?” she asked, and nodded her chin at the VCR and its unreeling tape. “What a stupid picture.”

  “Did you fall asleep during the movie?” Amy Joy asked. She noticed that Winnie was not in the room. Sicily squinted her eyes up at Amy Joy, and then past her to where Miranda stood. Miranda smiled, a wide McKinnon smile, a dark swath of bangs sweeping in over her left eye. Sicily stared.

  “Pearl?” she said, shaken, thinking maybe she was still asleep. It wasn’t an easy task to come out of a deep snooze, still cobwebby with the dreams of the subconscious, only to be confronted with tricks like this. She clutched at the little scarf someone had knotted about her neck. Amy Joy frowned at such foolishness: Sicily hated scarves.

  “Don’t be upset now, Mama,” Amy Joy said as her fingers quickly undid the scarf around her mother’s neck. She pulled it free. “This is Pearl’s great-granddaughter. Her name is Miranda. Can you just imagine us meeting one of Pearl’s great-grandchildren?”

  “Pearl was a fool to leave Mattagash,” Sicily said, shaking her head and making her little clucking sound of disapproval. “But you couldn’t tell her anything.” She looked again at Miranda, who said nothing.

  “How was the movie?” Amy Joy asked, but Sicily would not be deterred.

  “This is what’s wrong with the whole world nowadays,” she said, her index finger attacking the air. “Everybody wants something that lies just down the road,” Sicily said. “And nobody ever comes to any good who goes off looking for what was already under their own nose. What did Pearl gain, I ask you to tell me, by traipsing off downstate? She wanted to be a hairdresser, but she ended up marrying into a parcel of pallbearers and half-wits. That’s just what she did. And then she come dragging herself home like an old dog, just so she could die in peace.” Amy Joy considered this.

  “It wasn’t exactly in peace, Mama,” she said. “You moved in. Remember? Now you’ve got company here. Can’t you even say hello?” Miranda stepped in closer, her dark McKinnon eyes amused by Sicily.

  “I agree with you about the pallbearers and half-wits,” said Miranda. “But you’ve really made me mad with what you said about Cocoon. I think it’s a great film.” Sicily stopped clutching at her nubby sweater to give Miranda a swift look of disapproval.

  “That picture’s nothing but a cruel lie,” Sicily said. “The closest any old people in this place will ever get to going on a flying saucer is Saturday, when they ride the senior
citizen bus to Watertown to pick up their dentures. And in the meantime, all we do is sit around here like faded roses someone brung us, or carnations, or stubby green plants. We’re all sitting here like a bunch of wilted Mother’s Day bouquets.” She flung her sweater off her shoulders and onto an empty chair. It was so alive with electricity that she’d suddenly felt incapable of controlling it any longer. It was as if the sweater wanted to do things Sicily, riddled with age, simply could not do.

  “Can I get you anything?” Amy Joy asked. “I’m going to Watertown for a few groceries. The snow didn’t amount to much. The weathermen were right for a change. Do you need toothpaste, or shampoo, or a new large-print Reader’s Digest?” If she stopped talking, Sicily would begin. She could see her mother’s mouth now as it rounded up words, corralled them until the moment was right.

  “What age are you?” Sicily asked the tall girl with those old McKinnon eyes. “About one fourth of being as old as I am? No wonder you think that’s a good picture.”

  Miranda shrugged. So this was where her mother, Cynthia Jane, had managed to pick up her award-winning personality. It was obviously in the genes.

  “So what pisses you off the most?” Miranda asked suddenly. “Is it that I’m so young, or is it that you’re so old?”

  “Yes,” said Sicily. “Well then.” She reached again for the sweater and took it up in her hands. “That’s fine talk,” she said. “Fine talk indeed, this language of the new generation. What can young folks be thinking of these days, that’s what I’d like to know.” Amy Joy had said “pissed off” so many times that Sicily could no longer count them. Still, it was different hearing it from an out-of-towner.

  “Can I get you something?” Amy Joy asked.

  “Yes,” said Sicily. “You can get out of my face.”

  ***

  Winnie came back into the lounge and stared idly at the television screen. She was still recovering from her bout with the flu, a virus that seemed to circulate perpetually at Pine Valley.