by Alexis Smith
And this is where they stacked the finished coffins, Michael says, gesturing to the kitchen.
Michael has an overdeveloped sense of historical significance, Leo whispers to Isabel.
That must be why I like him, Isabel replies.
Leo smirks and nudges her toward the bar. He and Michael were lovers once, but it didn’t take.
During the war, Michael continues as they pass, there was such a need for coffins that they filled the whole room and actually started passing them through the windows and lowering them down to the street with pulleys.
Which war? Isabel turns to Leo for an answer.
He shrugs.
There are no doors in the main room, only a broad stairway from below and windows hemming the room at either end like headstones, wedged and solid and curved at the top, revealing fragments of signs and billboards outside. They are all tall enough to be doors and wide enough for caskets to pass through, Isabel thinks.
Isabel and Leo make drinks, then seat themselves on a windowsill to watch the party.
After a moment he asks: So, what happened?
She looks at Leo. Really looks at him, for the first time in weeks. He has lost weight again, she thinks. Smoking too much and not eating enough. She can still see the adolescent in him, and sometimes she envies his ability to forge into the future while she feels compelled to carry the past.
He had to go back, she says finally.
Go back?
To the woods.
There are period sofas and chairs—many eras, all set pieces, she’s sure—scattered around the loft. Isabel finds herself a vacant one and settles while Leo has a cigarette on the fire escape.
Michael appears. He holds out his hand.
Oh no, she says. My feet are a little sore. Actually, they’re wrecked. I’ve walked the city and back today.
Isabel, it would be a disgrace to that dress, he says, grabbing her hand.
The music is loud and percussion-heavy. She cannot demur. She lets tall Michael lead her around the room, practically carrying her, lifting her off her feet in an improvised waltz. She loses a shoe. Faces turn toward them as Michael ferries her through conversations, interrupts drunken courting. They are sanguine, dreamy, cocktail-soaked faces. More dancers join, anachronistic dance moves erupt. She loses her other shoe. She laughs until her eyes are wet and
Michael releases her to the wood planks, barefoot, telling her to watch for splinters, and then turns to a startled young man in a baby blue button-down shirt and sweeps him off his feet. He has dropped Isabel at the green velvet sofa where Leo has settled with a red-headed young man. His red-headed young man, she thinks. She runs her hands along her dress and falls next to Leo with a poof of her skirt.
Catch your breath, he says.
Hours sift through her. She feels whiskey-warm and almost grateful. Occasionally she leans out a window for air, counting stars, watching for the blinking lights of airplanes. Anyone out in the street, looking up at the old casket factory, would see her perched at the window, a merry ruckus behind her.
Then, at some point, a hush. Quietly, one voice then another, over the ledge, out the open windows, into the night street, where the last bus passes on its way across the river, where two gutter punks walk with their dog and a couple slips away from the late-night crêperie and speakeasy.
She turns back into the room. The others are piled onto the chairs and sofas. Half-empty glasses, dirty plates, crusts of bread smeared with savory pastes. A space cleared where two rise to demonstrate a jig. Two men who watched each other from across the room all night, leaning together now, one against the other, like fallen columns in ancient ruins. A playwright, and a musician, and a filmmaker, and a few actors, and a waiter who once modeled for Hedi Slimane, and some lovers and former lovers, all resting around a low table with a lopsided red velvet cake, white frosting glowing, wound gaping, recumbent forks. They gather around a few candles and drink what’s left in the bottles. They are all friends now, those who have made it this late into the night.
Isabel, Michael calls. Come seat yourself, it’s story time.
Isabel crosses the room and curls up on the floor against a sofa.
Let’s all tell a story we’ve never told anyone before.
What kind of story? the model asks.
I’m not much of a storyteller, the ingénue claims.
How about this, Michael says, leaning back into his velvet armchair. I’m the host, so I will tell you what kind of story to tell. It doesn’t have to be long, it doesn’t even have to be good. Just let it be true.
He turns to the model.
Adam, he says, decisively. Tell us a bittersweet story.
Adam stares seriously at the floor for a long, silent time. Then he looks up and says: Rhubarb.
When he was a boy in Massachusetts, he had the peculiar luck of finding dead animals everywhere: crows, robins, squirrels, shrews, and, once, four newborn kittens in an overturned box in the woods.
He would run home for a rag or some newspaper, then return to the animals, carefully gather them up, and take them home.
His mother told him to bury them, but not where to bury them, so he chose the spot in the garden by the rhubarb. Rhubarb was the first harvest from the garden every spring. His mother made pies and jam and syrups. The jeweled jars lined the bottom shelf of the lazy Susan all year. Rhubarb was also the one edible thing in the garden his mother didn’t forbid him to pick. He would yank the stalks up, strip off the poisonous leaves, pour some sugar into his palm, and dip the stalks in it, sucking the bitter-tart-sweet juice.
When he laid the animals down in the soil, he said the same prayer for each of them: I hope you find your way, friend. Then he covered them with soil and a small bouquet of whatever flowers he could find.
He would think of them every time his mother sent him to fetch a jar from the lazy Susan.
The ingénue’s turn comes next.
Paige, tell a story about . . . regret.
So she tells a story about visiting England when she was in college. She had a chance to visit the river in which a beloved writer drowned. She had a mousy friend with a family cottage nearby. But she wanted desperately to be fashionable. So instead she went to London to see a boy who later humiliated her—the only time in her life she’d ever been called a cunt—at a party full of people she thought she wanted to impress.
She pauses here, and then the story turns.
Her mother used to tell her she looked like someone else’s child. She used to sit on her mother’s lap and ask her questions. Did she have her mother’s eyes? Her nose? Her mouth? Her hands? Her voice? And the answer was always, No, no.
Her mother said, You must be a changeling. But all she wanted to be was her mother’s daughter. She remembers her mother’s face from the angle of her lap. The smell of her shampoo, and the hairs on her arms. She tells it like this, the river, London, the boy, and her mother.
Then the overseas call to her mother, asking for airfare home. And her mother saying, No. No.
Then comes Jacob, the painter, whose story must be about decay.
When he was a kid, Jacob’s mother worked at the old Dammasch State Hospital, an insane asylum in Wilsonville, Oregon. Years later, when the building was no longer in use, the painter befriended the nightshift security guard. They met at the local tavern. The guard was a young man just like the painter, who took on the job because he needed work, though it terrified him. The painter asked again and again to visit the abandoned building during the guard’s rounds, but the guard always refused—he could get fired, and besides—he’d trail off . . . shaking his head and staring into his beer.
After a few, the guard would start talking about the place. The sounds and smells of it. The graffiti and detritus. The way he couldn’t eat his lunch with his back to the station door. And the painter felt a thrill at the idea of visiting the place, an almost erotic desire to witness the remains of the building and what its occupants had left behind.
The painter parked at the gate and stood at the chain-link fence, waiting. He waited twenty minutes. He watched the building for movement, for a sign of his friend. He watched the surrounding fields. He watched the cars on the freeway in the distance, and the lights of the houses in the suburb a few miles away blinking on and off.
There was a ditch on the side of the road, the kind from his childhood, when they lived in a housing development nearby. He remembered one spring when the thaw had happened so quickly that the ditches filled up with water, and the neighborhood children, exhilarated by the sudden heat, stripped to their underwear and jumped in the muddy ditch. He remembered the feel of the warm mud between his toes and the murky water, and the way his mother just shrugged when she saw him there, in the ditch with the other children. She often slept on the sofa in the middle of the day, waking up periodically to smoke cigarettes and watch the soaps before she left for the asylum.
Waiting at the gate for his friend, he thought of his mother, the same age then as he was now, pulling up to this gate in her red Chrysler. Her hair was strawberry blonde, and she wore a medal of St. Christopher on a silver chain. He thought about her walking through the front doors, through the halls, cleaning up body fluids, tying sick people to their beds, witness to their shock treatments and nightmares.
The guard finally came, and they walked through the gate, up the steps. As the guard opened the door, shining his flashlight around the dead corridor, the painter realized he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t walk through the doors. After all that. All he could think about was his mother, not much older than himself, walking through those doors day after day.
Then it’s Leo’s turn.
Leo, Michael says. Leo, also known as Loon among people who love him. Loon, tell us a haunting story.
So Leo tells them about a recent dream. In the dream, he was obsessed with the movie The Night of the Hunter. But it wasn’t The Night of the Hunter. It was an old vampire movie with Theda Bara in it. In fact, it was called Return of the Hunter, a sequel. He was watching it on his grandmother’s old television. The one with the knob to turn from channel to channel and the rabbit ears. It was cased in wood and was so large and heavy that it sat on the floor, the largest piece of furniture in the room. But this was not in his grandmother’s living room. It was in an older house, a castle he was visiting in Wales. It was a moonless night. The furniture was growing its own upholstery. Armchairs and couches were alive, like plants. Mossy. Fungal. He didn’t want to sit on anything. There was a kitchen nearby with people preparing food from boxes and cans. Leo watched the vampire movie, thinking to himself that he must remember to find this movie later, in daylight, back in his city.
In the movie, a woman stood in a dark room. Blood smeared her collar bones. Tears streaked the kohl around her eyes. The film was black and white, but the blood was red. Brilliant, thought Leo’s dream self, believing this to be an amazing feat for early twentieth-century filmmaking. He felt afraid, like a child, as if he shouldn’t be watching this, as if he should run into the kitchen, to be safe in the company of others. But he realized this was important, this film. That all the other movies he had seen, or would ever see, would not affect him so much as this one. She was alone and she was going to die an ugly, painful death. Then she was dead, and he watched small children wearing black suits and dresses open and close their mouths over pointed, sharp teeth.
He walked into another dream, a dream in which Return of the Hunter still existed. His dream self went about normal daily activities, occasionally thinking of tracking down a copy—it must be in the Criterion Collection—they must have it at the library. He thought about watching it with his mother, who has lung cancer and spends her days in an armchair, watching movies.
So the stories come and go, one after another. Leo and Isabel watch each other across the circle. Isabel’s legs bent to her side, head in her hand, elbow propped on the corner of the sofa. Her slip is showing, her hair falling out of bobby pins. He looks like a kid, she thinks, hugging his knees to his chest like that. He knows all of my stories, she thinks. But he’ll take them to his grave.
She thinks of the story she will tell Spoke, if she has the chance. Her story could be told in other people’s things. The postcards and the photographs. A garnet ring and a needlepoint of the homestead. The aprons hanging from her kitchen door. Her soft, faded, dog-eared copy of Little House in the Big Woods. A closet full of dresses sewn before she was born.
All these things tell a story, but is it hers? It has always been more than an aesthetic choice, holding on to the past; it’s a kind of mourning for the things that do not last.
We do not last, she thinks. In the end, only the stories survive.
She thinks of the photograph of the eleven-year-old girl, standing under a glacier, saying goodbye.
Then Michael says her name.
Isabel.
She holds her breath.
They are all quiet; their eyes rest on her. She doesn’t know whether they are patiently attentive, or tired and needy, like children who will not fall asleep without one more story. She is the last. She thought that the party would be over by now. Wrung out. The guests dreaming in their rumpled suits and dresses, piles of clothing in dozing heaps scattered over the furniture and floor.
Isabel, Michael says again. Tell us a story—
She closes her eyes, but she can feel him looking at her, searching.
—about longing, he says.
Oh, God, she says under her breath.
She thinks of their first and last kiss, and the pang she felt, turning away from him. Spoke is already halfway across the country, where people are making breakfast, letting dogs out onto dewy lawns, boarding buses and trains for downtowns, lining up in coffee shops.
In Amsterdam, it is already a lovely evening, the leaves turning, fall about to break.
She opens her eyes. Through the tall windows, she sees a pale light rising between the buildings.
So she begins, I’ve never been to Amsterdam.
Copyright © 2012 Alexis Smith
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, contact Tin House Books, 2617 NW Thurman St., Portland, OR 97210.
Published by Tin House Books, Portland, Oregon, and New York, New York
Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West, 1700 Fourth St., Berkeley, CA 94710, www.pgw.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Alexis M.
Glaciers / Alexis Smith. -- 1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-935-63921-3
1. Alaska--Fiction. 2. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.M538G53 2012
813’.6--dc23
2011041838
First U.S. edition 2012
