Glaciers

by Alexis Smith

  One of the sisters died, at nineteen, of the Spanish flu. The other grew up to be the girl in the grass by the sea, who was the young soldier’s sweetheart. The soldier lost his mind in the trenches; his sweetheart never married. She sold fabric and notions in the general store and kept the bundle of her soldier’s letters in her delicates drawer next to a ring box containing a lock of her sister’s hair.

  She carried the photographs with her from year to year and from house to house, after her parents’ divorce, when she was ten. Then again, when she was eleven, and her mother moved to New Mexico with the man she met in a photography class, and her father moved with the girls to Portland. The people in the photographs came to mean as much to her as her own relatives. She had rescued them in Alaska, the only home she had ever known. She imagined them watching over her from the afterlife, grateful. That first lonely summer in Portland, before school started, she would climb the maple in her new yard and look out through the branches into the neighborhood, trying to imagine a time when her own existence, her clothes and hairstyle, and the saturated colors of their family snapshots, would be antique. Already her memories of Alaska were taking on the patina of relics; life in the city was transforming Isabel—from the sounds and the lights to the architecture and the way people dressed. Change was inevitable, but she could not imagine what the future might look like, or what her place might be in it. All she could do was hope she did not end up in a shoe box at a Salvation Army Thrift Store.

  City Trees

  Downtown in the morning, everyone moving, the trees listing, the bricks and green speckled with pigeons and starlings. Isabel steps off the bus and onto the sidewalk. She moves more quickly than she would like, in the fresh air, drawn along by all the other moving bodies. Shoes clicking and clapping around her. Suits and leather satchels brushing past, disappearing through glass doors, into tall buildings. Trains stopping and starting. The bus pulling away from the curb with a raspy cough.

  A few yellow ginkgo leaves flutter from a tree, and Isabel watches them eddy around the elk statue and into the fountain below. No one else seems to notice, moving so quickly up the sidewalks.

  Isabel thinks of Amsterdam. She wonders what kind of leaves fell into the young man’s hat. Amsterdam, like Portland, is full of trees. Elms and planes: old giants, planted like soldiers in long rows along avenues and in city squares. Most of the trees of Amsterdam were planted after the war, when almost all of the trees and much of the city were destroyed. Isabel remembers the passage in Anne Frank’s diary, about glimpses of a chestnut tree and the sky, hemmed by a small window. Anne’s tree survived the war, but Isabel read in the newspaper recently that it is rotting from within, and there was talk of cutting it down.

  Isabel lifts her gaze to the umbrella of leaves overhead, framed by the tall buildings. Dutch elms and London plane trees among the ginkgos.

  Chestnut leaves would be too big to fit into a hat, she thinks.

  Isabel waits for the light, shuddering with the easterly breeze at an intersection, skirt clinging to her bare legs, skin prickling all over. She clutches her sweater to her. The people around her become rigid while the breeze weaves through them, some turning into it, some away. As the light changes, the breeze shifts the leaves, and the sun warms her again. She steps off the curb into the street and hastens her pace to the library.

  The Wounded

  Isabel turns the metal knob on her office door and pushes until she feels the thump of the door against her chair. She glances at the cart of books in the hallway outside her door: the wounded. All day Isabel presides over the library’s damaged books, which, ironically, requires lots of paperwork.

  But she actually loves her job. She abandoned writing for library science in college, at the urging of her grandmother, who claimed there was no market for being in love with words. Isabel chose her area of specialty, preservation and conservation, as a minor rebellion and as a matter of course: salvaging the mistreated came naturally to her, though it might not be the most marketable skill she could acquire.

  She drops her bag on her desk then pulls off her sweater, hanging it over the back of her chair, and listens for sounds of habitation around her. She likes arriving early, settling in before everyone else arrives.

  Up and down the hall are other small offices and meeting rooms for others like her: the subspecialists, the techies, the genealogists, the archivists. The librarians work upstairs, in larger, brighter, carpeted rooms, with newer computers and more comfortable chairs. This part of the basement was once a bomb shelter; her office was once a mop closet.

  You work in the secret underground! her best friend, Leo, exclaimed the first time he visited her at work.

  Then he told her about the sewers in comic books—the kind inhabited by acid-drenched humans and the bitter, discarded former pets of urbanites. The hero goes there to find unlikely allies against the real evil, the great evil, the one living right out in the open, driving the fancy car and hosting cocktail parties. Monotonous and thankless as her job can be sometimes, she cheers at the thought of her coworkers—a dozen of them crammed into their little offices in the basement—all cleverly disguised as harmless geeks, all capable of saving the world if called upon.

  Walking down the hall, Isabel sees a shadow in the kitchenette, probably Spoke, from tech support, who arrives earlier than anyone else. The thought of him gives her insides a little stir. His given name is Thomas, but everyone calls him Spoke, even their boss. Spoke is the nickname he got in the war, and though no one here was in the war with him, it comes out naturally, as if it were the only way to acknowledge what he has been through without actually bringing it up.

  She makes her way down the hall, composing herself, the weight of a cup in her palm.

  Think pretty thoughts, she tells herself, remembering something her mother used to say to her about thinking pretty being pretty. Her mother was full of vaguely quotable advice for life, which she collected and offered but seemed to have no further use for herself, like a linty tissue pulled from a coat pocket. Isabel’s pretty thought: autumn leaves drifting to the ground; a couple—the lovers from the postcard—under the trees.

  Spoke hunches over a mason jar full of black coffee with his back to the door. A dusty blue sweater with blown-out elbows, foot tapping as he hums. It pleases her to see him like this, sitting at the kitchenette table first thing in the morning, his black glasses fogged with coffee steam. It is as close as she has been to waking up with him.

  Good morning, Isabel, he says without looking up. He’s reading the newspaper.

  Good morning, Spoke, she says.

  She turns to the cupboard and waits to feel his eyes on her. Waits, and pretends to look through the box for a tea bag, though it is right there, the Earl Grey she has every morning.

  There is a physics to their relationship. She feels the attraction as a force, like the gravitational tug of celestial bodies in orbit; but it seems that to touch, one of them must crash into the other.

  She fills her cup with hot water from the spout on the water cooler, spoons honey at the counter and waits. She feels the hairs on the back of her neck and the ungainly reach of her limbs. She stirs, puts the hot spoon into her mouth, the metal and sweetness burning her tongue.

  They have worked together for a year, since Spoke got out of the war. This fact—that he was a soldier—made them all nervous at first, having heard stories of trauma leaving people unhinged. Like a screen door slapping the side of a house until it finally flies off in a gale.

  Spoke was not like that. Or any of the other images Isabel might have conjured for the word soldier. Meat. Packaged meat. The grill of a truck. Cinder blocks. All vaguely unpleasant but ubiquitous things. All symbols for things Isabel would rather not explore in detail: the vicissitudes of war and its byproducts. But no: there was Spoke on his first day, bike helmet in one hand, offering the other to everybody in turn. Old button-down shirt and beaten jeans, rolled up at one ankle, in the cyclists’ way, revealin
g a striped sock. Glasses slightly out of style. Everything slightly out of style, as if he had been away awhile.

  Isabel was familiar with this condition, present in people who have been living abroad or off the grid. In Alaska the popular trends arrived slowly, if they ever made it at all. So that when her family moved to the States, her middle school classmates thought her anachronistic—a remnant of two or three years past. This, she thinks, probably determined her taste in clothes for the rest of her life.

  In a similar way, Spoke was a curiosity for everyone at the library. He had lived somewhere foreign, in circumstances they barely sketched in their minds (with disproportionate emphasis on dramatic weather). Molly, who works across the hall from Isabel, once said that Spoke seemed not quite present. For Isabel it is more that his presence calls to mind a time before. Before what? she thinks. Before the war, maybe. Or more likely some in-between time, when the war existed, was taking place, but everyone thought (or hoped) it would be over swiftly. It was a time of breath holding.

  When she turns back to the table, he picks up a spoon and stirs his coffee. She cups her tea in both hands, fingers wrapping around the cup and meeting on the other side. He taps the spoon against the glass rim. He closes his eyes and inhales coffee vapor.

  Now she can’t imagine a soldier unlike Spoke.

  She seats herself and takes measured sips from her cup.

  What’s new in the world? she asks, shuffling the paper, glancing at the headlines.

  They regard each other across the table.

  Do you want the good news or the bad? he asks.

  There’s good news? she brightens.

  He smiles with one half of his mouth.

  He refolds the Metro page and hands it to her, and picks up the Arts. They both read. He hums a little louder, the same four bars.

  She listens. They read. The sounds of paper between them as they turn and crease and carefully avoid touching each other. Then, sounds of their coworkers arriving, doors unlatching and footfalls. Their morning ending.

  Time to wake up, she thinks. She closes her eyes and breathes all the way to the bottom of her lungs.

  She wants him to want to be looking at her.

  Lungs

  Before Isabel could read, she loved books. They had one bookshelf in the homestead, and if she were left alone too long as a baby or toddler, she would pull every book from the low wooden shelves. She remembers the weight of them heaped over her small legs, the coolness of them on her bare skin. She loved to find the pages of the Fannie Farmer Cookbook that had smudges of batter and saucy fingerprints, and to gaze at the Garth Williams illustrations in Little House in the Big Woods, from which her parents read a chapter aloud every night the winter she turned four.

  She remembers sitting in an armchair with Agnes reading the nature encyclopedia, screaming over and over again, first with fright, then glee, when they turned to the magnified pictures of spiders. Her sister read that spiders have book lungs, which fold in and out over themselves like pages. This pleased Isabel immensely. When she learned later that humans do not also have book lungs, she was disappointed. Book lungs. It made complete sense to her. This way breath, this way life: through here.

  Leo, her best friend since middle school, wrote his name in every book he checked out from the library the whole time he was a teenager. The first was Giovanni’s Room. It was his form of tagging. He chose the pages carefully, to exact the most symbolic significance. Thus the small, all-caps black lettering, LEO, adjacent the gayest of passages in every book. Other books he marked: Our Lady of the Flowers, Apartment in Athens, The Good Soldier. When he revealed his habit to Isabel, she scolded him.

  Those are library books, asshole, not men’s room stalls, she said. Why don’t you just steal gay books from Powell’s like a normal juvenile delinquent?

  A decade later, when she started working at the library, she wondered if one of Leo’s books would find her. It was a shock when one finally appeared. She had almost forgotten. It was a copy of Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights. As she pulled the book from her cart, it bloomed open in her two hands. With an exhausted, papery sigh, the pages fell out one by one and drifted to the floor. Isabel bent down to pick up the pages, and there was Leo’s name, on page ninety-seven, next to a passage about “the travels of youth, the cheapness of things,” and Amsterdam.

  After work that day, she went to a barbeque at a coworker’s house. Spoke was there, too, though he was new to the library then. When Isabel saw him sitting alone at the kitchen table, she quickly took the seat across from him. After hellos, they sat in silence, watching others. A band was setting up outside, under the carport. People positioned lawn chairs and laid out blankets on the scrappy patch of grass. The summer light was fading and there was a lightness in the air, so that voices seemed to float in the window several seconds after they were spoken. Someone plugged in a string of Christmas lights, and folks let out a cheer.

  Isabel and Spoke both smiled at the sound.

  Then there was small talk. She asked how he was settling in to the job. He talked about getting used to new people, new routines. Then he asked her about her day.

  Isabel started to give a rote reply, then she remembered Leo’s book. She told Spoke about the book falling apart in her hands, finding Leo’s name, how improbable it was that she should find that page in that book. She had tacked it to the wall by her desk.

  He asked about Leo.

  We met in sixth grade homeroom, she said. She wiped the condensation from her bottle of beer as she talked.

  I call him Loon. He had a high-pitched, wavering voice that the other boys made fun of. The first time I heard it, during roll call, it reminded me of the loons we used to hear on Skilak Lake in Alaska.

  She took a long drink and Spoke took a long drink and they set their bottles down at the same time.

  What’s your story? she asked.

  My story?

  You were in Iraq, right? Isn’t that where you got your nickname?

  He leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms behind his head and clasped his hands behind his skull. He was wearing a worn T-shirt with the image of U2’s Boy, and for a moment his pose mirrored the one of the little boy on the shirt. He looked curiously at Isabel, and she felt he was measuring her in some way. Not physically, not for prettiness; not for intelligence, even. Then he put his elbows back on the table.

  Well, he began, since we’re talking about books, there is a book in my story.

  He told her about a copy of Dhalgren he took with him to Iraq and kept in his vest pocket sometimes. He read a lot of science fiction then. He had just finished The Stars My Destination, and someone recommended Samuel Delaney for something different. He picked Dhalgren because he liked the weight of it and it looked long enough to last him a while.

  He paused, and seemed to be done with his story. He took another drink and looked out into the room. Isabel leaned closer. She got the feeling he was talking to her like she was a woman—or no, maybe just a naïve, liberal civilian—he was censoring himself, choosing his words deliberately, when the words he might naturally choose would be profane.

  Do you really want to hear this? he asked.

  Only if you want to tell me, she said.

  He seemed to weigh this, then shrugged.

  He fixed machines in Iraq. Armored vehicles and tanks, mostly, but also radios, flashlights, and the personal electronic devices of his friends. He fixed everything that crossed his path—even things that didn’t seem to need fixing—they all worked a little better after he’d tinkered with them. He got a reputation as the fix-it guy.

  So when did you meet the bicycle? Isabel asked. He looked her in the eye for a long time, wondering, she imagined, whether he should laugh and jokingly tell her to fuck off, then end the story. But he liked her, she could tell, and this made her brave enough to ask and look right back at him without demurring.

  How do you know there’s a bicycle? he asked.

 
There must be a bicycle in this story, or we’d be calling you Transmission. Or Headphones.

  He smiled, shaking his head.

  I’d take Headphones, he said.

  She softened then, realizing how close she was to an experience she had no right to be glib about.

  He took another drink.

  We were outside Haditha, he said. There had just been a lot of trouble with insurgents there, but it seemed to be dying down. Where we were, near this village on the Euphrates, things were calm. We were waiting for something. Those times can be worse than being in the fray, in a strange way. You start to remember what normal is like. You see or hear something that reminds you of home—it can be anything, a dog loping along a ditch, a whistled tune, anything—and then you get this yearning . . .

  That day I saw something: a couple of kids—boys, ten or twelve years old—trying to ride a busted bicycle down this pitted dirt road. It was ancient—who knows where they got it? The frame was bent, the chain kept slipping off. It was too big for these kids and one of them crashed, just bit the dust. And just like that I was back in Wisconsin, watching the neighbor kid fall off his bike outside our house, crying over his scraped-up knee, then climbing back up on the seat and pedaling home, snot running down his face.

  I guess I was staring at them for a long time. I was with my sergeant and a few guys at the time.

  My sergeant slapped me on the back and said: Dahl, why don’t you go over there and fix that bike?

  He thought it was funny. I’m always fixing shit. I walked over and gestured to the bike. The kids didn’t run away—they were used to us by then—they just handed it over and stood back. I monkeyed with the chain—I didn’t have tools on me, just a utility knife. My sergeant and the other guys thought it was fucking hilarious. They were about twenty yards away, across the road, grinning and talking shit. The kids just watched over my shoulder. I finally got it fixed so the chain wouldn’t slip off, so I gestured to the kids, but they wouldn’t try it. They were shaking their heads like, No way, man, you first.