Glaciers

by Alexis Smith

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Amsterdam

  Glaciers

  Secondhand

  Afterlife

  City Trees

  The Wounded

  Lungs

  Loon

  Bones

  Danish Modern

  Choirgirl

  Architecture

  Details

  Life in a Northern Town

  Fortunes

  Back Pocket

  Thaw

  Rest and Gladness

  Exit, Glacier

  Adrift

  All Dressed Up

  Other People’s Stories

  Copyright Page

  For Wren

  Amsterdam

  Isabel often thinks of Amsterdam, though she has never been there, and probably never will go.

  As a child in a small town on Cook Inlet in Alaska, she saw volcanoes erupting, whales migrating, and icebergs looming at sea before she ever saw a skyscraper or what could properly be called architecture. She was nine years old, on a trip to her aunt’s with her mother and sister, the first time she visited a real metropolis: Seattle. She took it all in—the towering buildings and industrial warehouses, the train tracks and bridges, the sidewalk cafés and neighborhood shops, and the skyline along Highway 99, the way the city seemed to rise right up out of Elliot Bay, mirroring the Olympic Mountains across the sound. The breadth and the details overwhelmed her, but soon she loved the city in the same way she loved the landscape of the north. Old churches were grand and solemn, just like glaciers, and dilapidated houses filled her with the same sense of sadness as a stand of leafless winter trees.

  She began collecting postcards of other cities: Paris, London, Prague, Budapest, Cairo, Barcelona. She borrowed books from the library and watched old movies, just to get a glimpse of these other places. She imagined visiting them, walking the streets, sleeping in creaky beds in hostels, learning a few words of every language.

  Isabel finds the postcard of Amsterdam on Thursday evening, at her favorite junk store, across from the food carts on Hawthorne. It is a photograph of tall houses on a canal, each painted a different color, pressed together and tilted slightly, like a line of people, arm in arm, peering tentatively into the water. The picture has a Technicolor glow, the colors hovering over the scene rather than inhabiting it.

  She turns the postcard over, expecting nothing—an antique white space never utilized—like others on the rack, bought decades ago on long-forgotten vacations, and never mailed. But Amsterdam had been stamped; Amsterdam had been posted. The postmark is dated 14 Sept 1965 and there is a message, carefully inscribed:

  Dear L—

  Fell asleep in a park. Started to rain. Woke up with my hat full of leaves. You are all I see when I open or close a book.

  Yours,

  M

  Isabel stands before the rotating metal rack for a long time, holding the postcard, rereading the message, imagining the young man (it must have been a young man) whose small, precise handwriting stretches across allotted space perfectly. She imagines the young woman (Miss L. Bertram, 2580 N. Ivanhoe St., Portland, Ore) who received the postcard, and how much she must have read between those few lines, how much she must have longed for him to say more.

  Isabel turns back to the image of Amsterdam, wondering if the houses on the canal still stand, or if they have succumbed to time and damp. Amsterdam is one of those low-lying cities, she thinks, remembering a New Yorker article about melting icecaps.

  She searches the rack for more of Amsterdam and the correspondence between M and L, but finds none. She buys the postcard and leaves with it tucked deep in her coat pocket.

  Walking home, she thinks Amsterdam must be a lot like Portland. A slick fog of a city in the winter, drenched in itself. In the spring and summer: leafy, undulating green, humming with bicycles, breeze-borne seeds whirling by like tiny white galaxies. And in the early glorious days of fall, she thinks, looking around her, chill mist in the mornings, bright sunshine and halos of gold and amber for every tree.

  Back in her apartment she pins Amsterdam to the wall above her bed, beneath another old postcard: four brightly painted totem poles and a few muskeg spruce, leaning over a marshy inlet.

  Glaciers

  Isabel’s parents returned to Alaska soon after she was born. They had lived in Washington for four years, since Isabel’s older sister, Agnes, was born. They lived in a dumpy apartment over a drugstore in Bellingham, then in a cooperative household in Seattle, with three other families, several cats, and a blind Labrador retriever named Little John. Isabel’s father was a musician who had dropped out of music school. He worked odd jobs and gave the occasional guitar lesson. Isabel’s mother stayed home with Agnes, cooking and gardening with the other women in the household. With one child, the family might have gone on like this. Isabel was born on Valentine’s Day 1979, and within a month her parents decided to go back to where they had grown up, where her father could get a good-paying job on the North Slope.

  Isabel doesn’t actually remember, but she imagines the voyage now, twenty-eight years later.

  The ferry from Seattle was crowded with other families, not Alaskan families but the kind of loose-minded travelers who pointed and photographed without really seeing.

  Like other great creatures before them, the glaciers were dying, and their death, so distant and unimaginable, was a spectacle not to be missed. The ferry slowed where a massive glacier met the ocean; a long, low cracking announced the rupture of ice from glacier; then came the slow lunge of the ice into the sea. This is calving—when part of a glacier breaks free and becomes an iceberg—a kind of birth. The calving sent waves, rocking the ferry. Hands gripped railings and feet separated on gridded steel. There were shouts of appreciation and fear, but nothing like grief, not even ordinary sadness.

  North of Juneau, the boat lingered near some rocks. A voice announced that below, starboard, was the wreck of the Princess Sophia, sunk in a storm just before the armistice. A gale whipped the ship over some rocks and tore her open like a can of salmon. All aboard died in the oily, frigid water. Only the captain’s wolfhound, which made the dark, impossible swim to shore, survived. He shivered and howled among the rocks until rescuers carried him away. Only a few yards of mast were visible above water after the ship went down, and the wind and waves had driven the bodies of passengers and crew miles along the coastline.

  The travelers, pondering this tragedy, lined the rails to peer into the water. Somewhere beneath them, they contemplated, were the disintegrating remains of a boat not so different from the one they were on. What did they expect to see in that water? Their own wavering reflections stared gravely back at them.

  Isabel’s family sat in the commissary during the viewing of the Princess Sophia, eating sandwiches with no lettuce.

  Only a few grainy photographs remain to tell the tale. In the first, she is dressed in hand-knit blue wool. The smallest living thing, even smaller than the gulls. Her father holds her, his back against the railing, her mother and Agnes to the left. Behind them: deep dark water and stony sky. The porpoises that sometimes surfaced are not surfacing. The whales that sometimes arched smoothly over the waves are not worrying the water’s fractal plaintiveness. Other photographs are notable for what is absent: her mother, who was the photographer, only appears at the beginning of this story, for the family portrait, then disappears.

  The steaming boat eventually harbored. There were long hours on land in a car, north, then south again, down the peninsula to Soldotna, named (some said) after the Russian word soldat for soldier. A small city on the Kenai River known for its salmon and halibut fishing, and as a gas and bathroom break on the way to Homer.

  Outside tow
n was the homestead of her father’s grandmother, Agnes, her sister’s namesake, who had died the previous summer. Three rooms with a woodstove and running well water. A small garden with raspberries and a weedy patch of Sitka strawberries. An acre of woods. Her mother made the beds with felted-wool and down blankets. The cast-iron pans and chipped china came with the house. Her father hung a rope swing for her sister from the tallest tree. Her mother started seeds in the greenhouse. The aspen and birch were just opening up, shuddering off the cold.

  Secondhand

  She wakes just before her alarm goes off, stretches her arm over the pillows and cat to reach the clock. The crows woke her, in the trees outside; they slipped into that place between dreaming and waking. The crows in the trees outside her window flew into the thrift shop. A whole murder of them landing on the clothes, making a racket in the fluttering dresses. Her recurring dream: finding a small vintage shop set in the side of a decaying building; rows and rows of old clothes to get lost in. She was trying on a blue wool coat, a Pendleton or maybe a London Fog, perfect for walking in the fall, by the tall houses on an Amsterdam street. Then the crows; then the coat disappeared and she felt the dream escaping, tried to conjure it back. Crows. She burrows her head under the pillows, stretches her warm legs into the cool, vacant places in the sheets.

  There’s no use resisting the morning now; she’s awake. Cat nudging her shoulder. Garbage truck outside, accompanying the crows. Isabel scratches the cat’s whiskers and rubs her head with her palm.

  You’re such a good cat, she says. And then she says it again, such a good cat, because she tends to say things twice to animals.

  She sits up, throwing her legs over the edge of the bed, and the cat jumps down, underfoot all the way to the kitchen. The early morning sunlight warms a patch of linoleum, and she lets her feet bathe in it while the kettle heats on the stove.

  I think I’ll buy a new dress for the party tonight, she tells the cat. A new dress, she says, thinking of her dream, and all the other times she’s had the dream, and how odd it is to dream again and again of thrift stores.

  In some of the dreams, the store is run by knowledgeable older ladies who worked in the theater in their younger lives. In others, she finds herself in junk stores and church shops, where she finds a stash of coats and dresses, all the former property of some meticulous, stylish dame who passed away with several decades’worth of fashion archived in her closets. In many of these dreams, Isabel becomes disoriented, or suddenly loses her glasses and can’t see, or she realizes she doesn’t have any money and she has to leave it all behind. Or sometimes, as she’s trying on a dress, feeling the satin lining slip over her skin, she falls into a narcotic sleep—a dream of sleep—and wakes up—actually wakes up—in her bed, with her striped sheets and the cat grooming herself, and the crows outside, and the garbage trucks.

  What a symbol, she thinks, to have running around your head.

  But there it was, every so often, making her want things. The way she hungered for things when she woke! Secretary blouses, silk dressing gowns, houndstooth skirts, beaded cardigans. She has a closet full of old clothes; still she dreams about them.

  She looks around her kitchen at the accumulation of years’worth of seeking out church rummage sales and small town junk shops: the mismatched teacups and saucers in the cupboard, the faded aprons hanging from hooks on the door, the Vera tea towels in a basket on her tiny kitchen table, between the rooster and hen salt and pepper shakers.

  In her old apartment, on the top floor of a ninety-year-old house, these things do not look out of place, but as she gazes at them, Isabel realizes that these things were all new, once. They were purchased and carried home in boxes or department store shopping bags. Perhaps they were given as gifts. Their value was their newness, once, and none of these things would have gone together in a kitchen of any decade before now. A new bride would have wanted a set of matching china, complete with serving platters and gravy boats. The rooster and hen of the 1940s would have looked hopelessly old-fashioned next to the bright geometric-print linens of the 1960s. The hand-sewn aprons would have been folded away in a drawer or hung on the back of the door, not displayed as if they were objects to be admired.

  But Isabel does admire these things. She feels a need to care for them that goes beyond an enduring aesthetic appreciation. She loves them like adopted children.

  She butters a piece of toast, pours a cup of tea, and spoons some honey. Her mother had a way of stirring honey into tea—counterclockwise four times, then clockwise once—that Isabel has practiced since she was a little girl. There was something in the angle of her mother’s wrist and the calm, distant gaze out the kitchen window that made her seem younger, prettier. Isabel realizes now that she had been seeing through her mother, to the woman she had been before she and Agnes were born.

  She takes a bite of toast and sits at the table with her breakfast. The cat rubs herself against Isabel’s bare legs. Out the window, a single crow swoops and rests on the telephone line, silently. The line dips and sways. Isabel sips her tea and stares at the bird against the pale morning sky, thoughts drifting from crow, to dream, to dress, to what she will wear today (the brown skirt with the kick pleats, she thinks, and the dark blue White Stag blouse she found in Astoria last summer).

  The crow drops from the line, sails away.

  Afterlife

  She was four, not yet in school, when her father first took her junking. It began with biscuits and gravy at the High Tide Diner in Old Kenai, a few blocks of nearly dilapidated clapboard buildings with pitted and rocky parking lots overlooking the delta of the Kenai River and Cook Inlet. The waitresses, whose regulars were leathery from cigarettes and the sea, or missing fingers from the canneries, fussed over the young father and his plump, blue-eyed little girl who liked to stand inside the vinyl booth and look back into the room through the mirrors along the walls. (What she saw: the backs of old men smoking at the counter; the soda fountain; the waitresses sorting flatware and pouring coffee; the little window where the plates of food came out of the kitchen; and the most peculiar thing, on the wall above the cash register, a photograph of Mount Redoubt varnished to an enormous piece of driftwood, with hands that ticked around an invisible clock.)

  After breakfast they climbed back into her father’s rusty orange Chevy pickup and took an unpaved back road to the Salvation Army Thrift Store. Isabel’s father flipped through bins of records and she wandered around, looking for treasures.

  There are treasures everywhere, her father told her.

  What kind of treasures? she asked.

  All kinds. Like this, he said, grinning, holding up a record with a picture of a woman covered from head to toe in whipped cream.

  Oh, Isabel said, unsure if this was actually proof.

  Belly, he said, putting the record down on his stack and squatting next to her, it’s a treasure if you love it. It doesn’t matter how much it costs, or whether anyone else wants it. If you love it, you will treasure it, does that make sense?

  Yes, she said, though it was still unclear. She loved biscuits and gravy. She loved watching snow fall. She loved to swing so high her toes seemed to brush the tops of the trees.

  Her father went back to the records and Isabel looked around her. They were the only customers in the store. An elderly woman hobbled from the back with an armload of scarves. Isabel set off in the opposite direction, passing racks of men’s clothes, shelves of pots and pans, bins of weathered sports equipment.

  Along the way she stopped, pointed to objects and turned back to her father asking, Daddy, do I love this hat? Do I love this jar? Daddy, do I love this snowshoe?

  I don’t know, Belly, do you? her father replied, every time.

  Eventually she lost sight of him and continued to wander through the store. She climbed onto a stool by the cash register, where there was a glass case full of jewelry and knickknacks. She peered through the glass at the pendants and rings and ceramic figures—a pair of cats, a
shepherdess, an elaborately decorated woman’s shoe that would fit into Isabel’s palm.

  Then she noticed a shoe box on top of the counter, full of old photographs. Most of them were black and white, some on stiff cardboard with names and dates she couldn’t read written on the backs. She picked up one, then another, looking carefully at the people, especially their expressions and clothes. She took in the whole box with her small fingers and serious gaze. There were children with buttoned boots and unsmiling fixed faces. Young women in lacy dresses, holding bouquets of flowers, colors faded. Family portraits in front of houses and cars, and one with a horse. There were entire families there, dispossessed, thrown together like refugees.

  They must be lonely, she thought, and scared, all night in the cold, quiet shop.

  She carefully sorted through them until she found the few she must save. Among them: two little blonde girls, probably sisters, posed in matching dresses with big bows and lace-up boots; a young man in a military uniform, in front of a white farmhouse; and a sad-looking young woman in a pale flowered dress and sunhat, sitting in the tall grass by the sea.

  What did you find, Belly? her father asked when he found her.

  These people, she said, holding out her pictures, fanning them a little, like playing cards.

  Those are pretty old, aren’t they? he said, looking them over. He looked up at her. Well, now you know what treasures are, he told her.

  She took them home and asked for a special box to put them in. Her mother found an orange pekoe tin in the back of the kitchen cupboard and tapped the tea dust from it over the sink.

  For years Isabel kept the tin of pictures in her sock and underwear drawer, taking them out every now and then when she was alone. She invented stories for the people, based mostly on bits of other stories she gleaned from her grandmother’s cribbage friends.