Glaciers

by Alexis Smith

  Life in a Northern Town

  Isabel wanted new things for a brief time, the spring after her tenth birthday. It was during her parents’ divorce, but before she and Agnes knew that their mother was moving to New Mexico with a man named Steve, and that their father was applying for drafting jobs in Seattle and Portland.

  It was a long division, Isabel would realize later. After he lost his job on the North Slope, their father started taking college classes on the weekends in Anchorage, and his band played in bars at night to make money. Their mother took a photography class at the community college on a lark, she said, to stay sane. When her parents were together, they had little to say to each other. The fissures in their family grew until the most important parts broke free and began to float away.

  Agnes and Isabel felt the separation abruptly. One day, they were driving home from Pizza Paradiso in their dad’s Chevy, the taste of root beer and oregano still on their lips, and the next they were dividing everything between their little house by woods and the apartment in town their mother had rented.

  On packing day, Isabel and Agnes wandered around their room, choosing this toy and that book and a favorite dress or two. They dropped them into cardboard boxes onto which their mother had written, in purple magic marker, each of their names. Isabel found herself staring into her box at her belongings, noticing how different they looked, like they had suddenly lost the context of her life.

  Agnes talked about going to the mall in town to meet her friends, and for once Isabel wanted to tag along. Agnes occasionally skulked into the kitchen to whine at their mother, who insisted they stay home and pack. Isabel and Agnes had never fought much, but they were so different, in looks and in personality, that they rarely found reasons to bond. But that day Isabel felt the urge to join in her sister’s crusade.

  Please, Mom, they said. We’re nearly done. How much longer do we have to do this? This is our weekend. Don’t we get to do anything fun?

  When they went back into their bedroom, Agnes gave Isabel approving looks and helped her pack clothes so that they could finish quickly.

  Back in the kitchen, they started again.

  Their mother pretended to ignore them, turning her back to them, pulling things from cabinets and sorting them on the counter.

  Finally, Agnes unleashed the one she had been holding back, saving for just the moment when her mother’s irritation peaked.

  Why does your divorce have to ruin everything for us? she said.

  Yeah, Isabel said, following her sister’s lead.

  Their mother threw the Tupperware she was holding into the box at her feet. She turned and stared at her daughters, hands on her hips, shoulders slumped. Her mouth was agape but she didn’t seem to be breathing. Her curly hair sprung out of the kerchief she had tied over it that morning.

  Fine! she finally squeaked out, in a high-pitched voice Isabel recognized as the end-of-her-rope voice. Just get in the damn car!

  At the mall, their mother planted herself on a bench by the entrance with a diet soda and The Shell Seekers while Isabel silently tailed Agnes. The mall didn’t have much to offer: a drugstore, a candy shop and a Baskin-Robbins, the Book Cache, which sold best-sellers and greeting cards, Kinney’s shoe store, a sporting-goods shop, a Sears catalog kiosk with a row of rotary phones to place orders, and a J. Jacobs, which catered to teenagers.

  Agnes met her friends at J. Jacobs. They were all thin and pretty, with their ears pierced and their hair curled and sprayed up in waves over their foreheads. They gave Isabel a cursory glance as she lingered beside Agnes. Agnes gave her sister an apologetic look and Isabel took the hint. She set off wandering the store, looking here and there at the trendy clothes, watching Top 40 videos on the big TV above the register.

  Agnes and her friends made straight for the formal wear, gushing over the metallic pink bubble skirts and heart-shaped tops. The spring formal at Soldotna Junior High was just weeks away. Isabel caught a glimpse of Agnes holding a silky peach dress up to her body, peering down at herself while her friends cooed. Isabel knew their mother would never let Agnes wear the dress—J. Jacobs was cheap, she had said before, and not in a price way—she rarely let Agnes buy so much as a T-shirt.

  Isabel watched the videos: Debbie Gibson and the New Kids on the Block. She turned at a rack of jeans and came face to face with herself in the mirrored far wall: tattered ponytail, shabby pink windbreaker, her sister’s old jeans rolled up at the ankles, and dirty sneakers. She could hear the urgent, secretive talk and gurgling laughter of the older girls in the dressing rooms, and she began to understand why her sister liked to come here and try on beautiful dresses she could never buy: it was like trying on another life.

  Isabel walked back through the store, keeping an eye out for something—anything—she thought she might try. She settled on a hot-pink, short-sleeved knit top with buttons along the right shoulder. She took the smallest one from the rack and walked past her sister without making eye contact, straight into a dressing room.

  What are you doing, Belly? Agnes called.

  Isabel pulled the curtain shut without responding. She took off her windbreaker and the white Anchorage Zoo T-shirt she wore underneath. She slipped the new shirt from its hanger and pulled it over her head.

  Isabel, you know Mom won’t buy that, Agnes said quietly from the other side of the curtain.

  The new shirt felt so soft draped on Isabel’s shoulders. The knit fabric was loose and the hem fell below her hips, almost like a dress. There was a perfume to the new shirt that was nothing like the Mule Team Borax smell of her hand-me-downs and thrift store shirts. Isabel turned to the side, looking at herself over the shoulder, trying different angles.

  Belly? Agnes poked her head through the curtain. She looked at Isabel and smiled.

  Too bad, she said. It’s pretty cool.

  Fortunes

  After lunch, heart lurching, Isabel drops her bag and the cellophane sack from Lola’s inside her office door, then walks down the hall to Spoke’s office. She clutches her fortune in her hand.

  His door is open and the room empty. She hesitates for a moment, then leaves the fortune on his desk so that he will find it when he gets back, a little scrap that says You will attend a party where strange customs prevail. Then she’ll ask him to go with her to the party tonight. He was right; it was the best fortune she could have gotten.

  In the hallway, she hears him on the stairs. She walks to her office door and watches him coming down with the head librarian, a tall woman in long, straight slacks who leans her head forward as she walks, as if she’s afraid she’ll hit it on the ceiling down there.

  —what we will do without you, she’s saying. It just doesn’t seem right to call you back, after you guys settle back into jobs and normal life. You’ve given so much already.

  It takes Isabel a moment to realize what they’re saying. Call you back. Called back.

  Will you be in the battlefield, or somewhere safer? Working with computers, somewhere away from it all?

  There are computers everywhere, he says to her.

  Their boss seems agitated, her eyes red-rimmed. She likes Spoke; they all do.

  He’s going back, Isabel thinks. He’s going back to war.

  Isabel puts a hand out and braces herself on the doorframe.

  Their boss is speaking so loudly; she must think he has told everyone by now. She gathers from the conversation that this has been in the works for a few weeks. He must have asked their boss not to tell them. He wanted to leave quietly. Come back to his job when this tour is done.

  He looks at Isabel as they pass and adjusts his glasses. She is close enough to reach out and touch his arm, and she almost does, but pulls back. He looks at her and the color in his cheeks rises and she knows he is ashamed. The look she must be giving him. She doesn’t care.

  She wants to say, What did you think was going to happen? But she won’t, not right now. She feels foolish. A sort of fury flows through her and makes her weak
in the knees. Her heart pounds. Her fortune on his desk, not sweet at all. Trying to flirt with him. He said nothing, this morning, all week long. How long has he known? He would not look at her, stirred his coffee and did not look at her. Opened his mouth and did not tell her.

  All the other office doors are open, all the seats turned toward the hall, no voices or typing, all the others listening. Ahmed, who shares Spoke’s office, must have told some of them. He comes out of Nate’s office, solemn. Nate follows. They both pause at the door, watching.

  When Spoke and the head librarian have disappeared around the corner, Isabel watches Molly’s freckled, manicured hand push open her door across the hall. Molly and Isabel look at each other.

  Two women who mean nothing to the world, Isabel thinks. They stare at each other. The glow draining from Isabel’s cheeks, the joy of the dress, folded into the little cellophane bag on her desk, gone. So trivial, that moment in the shop, in the mirror. He will never see her in the dress.

  Molly’s eyes widen and she mouths What the fuck? As if Isabel should know. Molly’s lipstick is worn away from lunch, her jaw clenched. She looks like she’s about to blow up at someone.

  Isabel could implode.

  We mean nothing, she thinks, looking at Molly looking at her. We will survive and continue to mean nothing. He will go back to the war and kill or be killed. We might appear in his dreams along with girls who went to his high school, girls who lived next door, girls who shop and work and drink beer at summer parties, girls he slept with or wanted to sleep with, girls who want to save him or be saved by him. When he dreams of them, he will open his mouth to speak and these girls will go off like bombs. Boom. Pieces of girls everywhere.

  Isabel rests her head on her arm against the door. She stands there, staring down at her feet in her shoes on the cheap carpet for minutes—she loses track of time and breath—until Peter comes around to collect cash.

  I’m going to the liquor store for whiskey. Let’em write us up, he says, who gives a fuck?

  Back Pocket

  She waits, fusses with papers in her office, slowly gathers her bag and sweater, composing them on her arm carefully, so that she can walk out with him. One by one the others leave. She listens to all their goodbyes.

  The afternoon passed in a stunned, vacant stare. At first they all pretended to work—Spoke busy becoming absent, removing everything he brought with him—then their boss went upstairs and they didn’t bother. Isabel stayed on the edge, just out of reach.

  At four o’clock they all gathered in the break room and poured whiskey into mugs for a mostly awkward farewell toast.

  Ahmed, always one to speak for others, gave a short, graceless speech about the fucked-up beauty of America, which concluded:

  It’s pretty much a mixed bag, you know? But you’re one of the good ones. We need you in the mix.

  Isabel stood across from Spoke, silent. Spoke smiled amiably and listened, but seemed to Isabel like a door slowly swinging closed over a worn arc of floor. When he looked at Isabel—their eyes meeting across the table for the last time—she tried to smile but tears filled her eyes, and he looked away.

  Isabel’s office is the last on the way out of the building, so she watches each of her friends leave. Nate nods at her as he passes. Peter says, What a fucking day, and Isabel agrees. Molly lugs her things from her office, then drops them in the middle of the hallway and grabs Isabel, hugging her. Isabel lifts her arms and wraps them around her until Molly suddenly pulls away, wipes her nose on her sleeve, picks up her belongings, and heads quickly up the stairs and out the door. Ahmed is the last to go, shaking his head. They all leave Spoke where they will remember him, and Isabel thinks that she could have done that, too. She could leave without a word, after his silence all day, all month.

  She listens to him leaving. Waits in her office door, staring at the floor, until she hears his footsteps turn in her direction. He stops next to her, leaning on the wall.

  You were waiting for me, he says.

  I was? She tries to be coy but it comes out with too much emotion behind it and sounds angry and defensive.

  Sorry, she says. I’m not very good with subtlety.

  No, he says thoughtfully, but your way is better.

  He reaches into the back pocket of his jeans and pulls out her fortune. She feels herself blush, seeing the way he holds it in his palm, examines it.

  I didn’t know, she says. I’m going to a party tonight—I thought you might come with me. It seems—I don’t know—shitty now.

  How could you have known?

  He reaches into his pocket again and pulls out an identical, tiny slip of white paper with red print. He hands it to her.

  Your journey will take you to faraway places.

  Her mind gets stuck on the word faraway. Staring at it printed on the fortune, it seemed less like an adjective and more like a proper noun, like its own country.

  She holds the fortune in her hand, unsure whether he means to give it to her.

  He puts her fortune back in his pocket. So she does the same with his. Then he gestures to the door and they start walking toward the stairs. They pause at the top, his hand on the metal door latch. He seems to be considering what he should say to her. She thinks about what is on the other side of the door: a postcard of a city.

  She curls her hair behind her ear. He shifts his bag to the shoulder opposite her.

  Walk with me? he asks.

  Okay, she nods.

  Around the building and down the brick steps. He unlocks his bike and they walk away together through their city, the ticking of his bike keeping time.

  Pausing at a corner as the commuter train pulls to a stop in front of them. When he looks at her she feels a crash behind her rib cage.

  How did you end up in the army? she asks.

  She doesn’t know why, but out it comes weighted with anger and grief. It sounds like an accusation, but to it is a confession: of all the things she thought about soldiers before she met him—that they are emotionally damaged uber-jocks, not people who listen to early U2 records and eat vegetarian Chinese food and talk about pacifist science fiction; and of the fact that she loves him for it—for being unexpected, for making her think differently, for setting her thoughts on the future, the quaint narrative she nurtures of the two of them in the world together; and that she cannot fathom why, after all he went through to arrive here, in this city, at the same time and place as Isabel, he would go far away to kill people, or worse, to blow away altogether this time.

  He looks up the sidewalk, measuring some distance up the street.

  Stepping off the curb, he lifts his bike and she watches their feet descend, her black leather slip-on next to his worn blue Converse.

  They’ve walked for nearly a block when he stops short and looks at her. They are in the middle of the sidewalk, face to face, between a tobacco shop and a trash can. Everything they’ve never said flows into the narrow space between them. Isabel feels the passing of time acutely, like a flood coming and only so much time to gather up the most important things.

  She looks at him, thinking how tall he is, how her nose would fit neatly into his clavicle if she walked right into him. A few people walk around them, pass. If she were other people, she would silently tell them to fucking move, yous. But she doesn’t care. The streetlights have changed, leaving them alone on this stretch of city block. Pigeons scuttle around the trash can, then begin to wander nearer their unmoving feet.

  I didn’t feel like I had many options, he says finally. I wanted experience and I wanted to get out of my hometown for a while.

  That’s an answer. Is it true?

  Yeah. Yes. All true.

  But that doesn’t really tell me, she says.

  It’s a long story, he says.

  I want the long story.

  He just looks at her intensely and for a moment she thinks he might kiss her. Then he nods and they walk.

  The food vendors across the street are packing up t
heir carts, washing down their counters and tables, cooling off in the breeze, sipping sodas or having a smoke.

  Their arms touch and her skin vibrates. He pulls away slightly. Maybe he doesn’t want to be so close to her, she thinks. Or maybe he does not want her to know how much he wants to touch her.

  So she moves closer to him, again, letting her bare arm brush against his. He doesn’t move away this time.

  Thaw

  When Isabel was small, her father worked on the Alaskan North Slope for what seemed like months at a time. It was actually two weeks on, two weeks off, but time seemed to go on longer then.

  In the winter, the Slope was a dark, starry place, with a colony of busy fathers working in the snow and ice. In the summer, the light never ended, and they measured one hour to the next by the beeps on their digital watches, eating periodically from vending machines. Isabel knew about the vending machines because when her father came home he always brought a candy bar for Agnes and Isabel to share.

  The girls couldn’t sleep summer nights, because of the light slipping in from outside. And on nights when their father was coming home, they waited up for him and the candy bar. She remembers running into his arms; the cold petroleum smell of his work clothes.

  But when they asked questions about where he had been and what he had been doing, he said very little. Only their mother told them what they wanted to know about oil underground and the dividend checks the family received every year.

  One winter night, their father came home early. His left hand was wrapped in bandages like a fat white mitten. There had been an accident; his hand was smashed. After a couple of days, they removed the bandages to take pictures, pictures Isabel can still draw up in her mind: horizontal blue lines where fingernails should have been; swollen, flat, crooked fingers that all curved in the same direction at the middle joint.