by Jane Smiley
I push open the barn door, and he leads her out into the snow. She walks two steps, then snorts and kicks out with one back foot. He leads her steadily forward, the way I taught him, never looking at her, never acting as though she has done anything out of the ordinary. She tries a little buck and kick, then tries to reach her nose down to the snow. He casts me one glance over his shoulder. He is a little afraid—she is a little friskier than usual, because of the cold. “Keep going,” I say. “She’s paying attention.” I follow them around the corner of the barn and down the long side. At the barnyard fence they stop and turn around and begin back toward me. He is holding her loosely, his right hand next to the leadline clip, the free end of the rope in his left. Every day one of us does this, over this same ground, past these same windows that look in upon the same assortment of livestock, but today, for the first time, the pony foal notices something—a blatting goat? a cat?—and she suddenly jerks away from Tommy, backing and shying, her nostrils wide and her ears bolted forward. He loses her with his right hand, but his left instinctively tightens on the rope and she jerks him around. I can see the look of surprise and panic on his face as she begins to pull him in a circle, throwing her head, bucking, kicking, neighing, now taking offense at every sound and movement in the vicinity.
The smartest thing for him to do would be to let go of the rope, and actually I have never thought to tell him what to do in this sort of circumstance—the mother pony is phlegmatic, and the pony foal has been so cooperative until now that her manners seemed permanent. But he doesn’t do the smartest thing; he reacts like a natural horseman and hangs on tight. There would be lots of reasons, if he knew them: to keep her from running off and maybe hurting herself, to keep her from successfully getting her way, to maintain his contact with her and therefore her attention upon him. I don’t panic. I don’t rush toward them. Whether by instinct, trust, or foolishness, I don’t react as if he is in danger, I just watch them float in the black-and-white picture created by trees and snow, yanking, tossing, pulling at each other. He keeps saying, “Sparkle! Sparkle!” His hat falls off. They are pretty far away when I finally begin to run toward them, dilatory father.
When I reach them they are still, if not calm. The pony is trembling and heaving, Tom is panting, his cheeks are aflame. They can barely walk, but I make them. Back to the spot where she shied, back to that moment, so that we can go over it and over it, erasing with habit any associations she might have with that spot. Was he in danger? I don’t know, but it is by common, and unvoiced, consent that we don’t bother to tell Liz about it when she returns in the afternoon.
That week is bitter cold, and it snows a few inches every day. Books and magazines are due at the library, and we long for new ones, but there is no going anywhere. Tom takes the bus, but we wrap his feet inside his boots in plastic bags, make him wear gloves and mittens, walk with him to the bus stop, more to make sure that he stays bundled up than anything else. Marlys and I exchange waves and shouts of “Brr!” She and Paul, her husband, recently moved into town after twenty years’ farming, so that he could indulge his real love, volunteer firefighting. The bedrooms are unbearable, so we drag our blankets into the living room and sleep near the stove with its masonry shell. There is no sun, so the insulated panels that we built to fit the windows are up all day. We are confined. Twice a day I shovel aside drifted snow and go out to the barn to feed the animals, muck out the goat pen, and milk the goats. We live like this at least once every year, and I haven’t especially minded it in the past. Country people love to brag about the weather, to compare phenomenal details, like the cows’ eyelids being frozen shut. Tom and I have a ritual when it gets cold like this—I run half a bucket of water, take it outside, and throw the water into the air. My grandfather swore that he had seen weather so cold that the water froze in glittering marbles before it hit the ground. I have never seen that, and I intend to in my lifetime if it is possible. Liz calls this my only ambition. Maybe. Tom is excited as soon as he wakes up each day—how cold is it? is it cold enough yet? is this the coldest place in the world? Bundles of sweaters and blankets and coats and pillows and socks pile up in the living room. After kerosene lamps day and night, the sojourns outside are blinding and huge, and it is hard not to be convinced that every exterior scene isn’t somehow suspended in ice and time. We nap off and on all day, luxuriantly entwined with each other, stray items of clothing, the cats, layers of blankets. We read favorite bits of old books aloud but are too sleepy to stick with anything for long.
On Saturday, another bitter, overcast day, while I am breaking the ice in the goats’ water bucket, I hear a car stop at the end of the lane, and not long after that Lydia Harris and a child, who must be Annabel, appear vividly on the path. They are carrying skates. Up in the house, I know, Liz and Tom are rooting around in their blankets still, drinking parsley tea with honey and telling each other jokes. As I left, Tom was saying, “How many raspberries can you put in an empty bowl?” and Liz was pretending she didn’t know. It seems to be fairly early morning, but in fact we let the clock wind down Thursday and forgot to set it yesterday by Tom’s arrival home from school. It could be any time. The Harrises, gazing around rather hesitantly, make me keenly aware of the yellow hole in the snow off the side of the front porch, where Tom and I have been peeing. Liz, to whom I never even mentioned my invitation, hasn’t been out of her nightgown since Wednesday.
Even so, they are a riveting picture, mother in jewel-green jacket and blue earmuffs, daughter in a parka so fuchsia-colored that it seems to expand as I look at it. The wind lifts a dry dusting of snow off the mounded drifts, and it whirls at their knees. Behind, the black filigree of the maple woods, snow on the mountains shading into snow in the clouds. It is the daughter who seems hesitant, from this distance almost sulky. She stops and Lydia pivots to talk to her, leaning down earnestly. Though I can hardly tell what she looks like, I can see a scowl on her face.
It’s still there when I come up to them, and maybe that’s the problem. She is a slender child, with a nutty complexion, a high, smooth forehead, and large eyes in wide-apart, flaring sockets. That she is a beauty in the making is a fact so present that talking around it is like not referring to a visible handicap. As I walk up to them, their conversation lingers in the dry, still air: “He said we should come when we felt like it. They don’t have a telephone.” “I’m embarrassed. I don’t think it’s nice to drop in.” “Skating will be fun.” Annabel throws me a hostile glance: my approach has robbed them of choice. She is not pleased, and it is obvious that hers is the pleasure most often consulted. Click click, just like that, my dislike of the child is solid, in place, maybe even permanent.
We walk slowly toward the house. Liz’s face appears in a window, disappears. I detour the Harrises through the barn, show them the sheep and the goats, the cows, the ponies, and the chickens. At the pony stall, Annabel Harris snaps from sullen to eager. “The foal’s a roan,” she says. “A strawberry roan with four white feet and a snip and a star. I used to take riding lessons in Boston, before we moved here.” She throws her mother an angry glance. “My favorite horse was a strawberry roan. His name was Billy.” It is the humble name of the horse, the way it makes me see a tall, rib-sprung, hammer-headed old nag, that reminds me she is a child. “I was in the canter class when we left.” I could allude to her riding the pony someday. It would mean nothing, but I don’t do it.
By the time we get to the house, Liz and Tom are dressed, the blankets are folded and stacked, and water is boiling on the woodstove. As we step in, stomping snow off our boots and making a flurry, I call out, “Did I tell you the Harrises might come and skate, Liz? I’m sure the pond is frozen all the way to the bottom after this week. Tom, get your skates, son. Time to get some fresh air.” He stands in the middle of the room, gawking at, perhaps, his nemesis.
Nevertheless, he wipes his nose, gets his skates from the skate chest, finds his coat, and Liz, without saying a word, does a surprising and impulsiv
e thing. She steps up to Lydia Harris and kisses her affectionately on the cheek, as if Lydia knows and welcomes all the thoughts we have had about her. And Lydia’s response is intriguing—in the split second between the knowledge that she is about to be kissed by a virtual stranger, and the kiss, she grows a second, cooler exterior, a skin separated from herself by a quarter-inch of airspace, a storm-window skin. The kiss does not seem to be followed by any discomfort, or even recognition, on Lydia’s part. As for Liz, she glances at me, exhilarated by what she has done. “Yes! Go skating,” she carols. “When you come in, I’ll have some apricot buns. I’ve been longing for some apricot buns!”
The path to the pond is uneven and slippery. The buildings and beds, when we glance back at them, look humble and drab, poor rather than handmade, but the pond glitters invitingly where the wind has blown away the floury dry snow. Tommy’s bragging to Annabel about how we swim in it all summer and skate on it all winter, and it’s full of trout, too, seems the expression of my own thoughts. After all, function is the superior virtue, isn’t it?
Annabel says, “I thought he said it was frozen to the bottom.”
“We aren’t going to fall through.” Tom is a bit scornful.
“Well, where do the trout go? Are they frozen, too?”
“Of course not.” He doesn’t go on, nor does he turn to me for help. He says, “Can you skate?”
“I took lessons in Boston last winter.”
In spite of lessons, the two children are about equal, and in fact have something of the same aggressive style. In no time at all, Annabel has shed her fuchsia coat (dropped it in the middle of the pond, and Lydia has fetched it and folded it neatly on a rock) and is racing Tom back and forth across the ice, two laps, then four, then six. She has as little glide as he does—their legs churn, their arms flail, but they never fall down. They shout at one another, at us, at nothing. Once Annabel simply peels off a scream. Lydia smiles, says, “Isn’t that awful? I mean, it’s only high spirits, but it’s so piercing. Nathan’s brother keeps saying he’s going to get her a summer job as a screamer in horror movies.”
“They have those?”
“Oh, sure. They don’t want the actors to scream and strain their voices. Marcus says she has perfect natural technique—total relaxation of the vocal chords. I say, Don’t encourage her. But she’s always been a screamer.”
Lydia is in no hurry to skate. She sits across from me on a large rock, looking around or watching Annabel. Every time her eyes come back to her daughter, her expression softens—the sculptured, dignified quality that is her natural demeanor grows momentarily receptive. It happens repeatedly, no matter what else she is doing or discussing. And when Annabel laughs, Lydia smiles. I have to admit that I sort of resent it, as if, in some peculiar way, Annabel were unworthy of such intensity.
“She’s a pretty little girl.”
“Oh, yes. And she knows it, too. I’ve been thinking lately that I made a mistake telling her all these years. My mama never let the word ‘pretty’ cross her lips, and when Annabel was a baby, she told me she was proud of that, proud of the way my sisters and I had so little vanity. But I knew that just because we never heard it didn’t mean we didn’t worry about it. My sister Zuby used to say that we must be awfully homely if even our mama wouldn’t say we were pretty. So Annabel was, and I told her she was, and now she’s very persnickety about what she wears and how her hair looks. I don’t know. It must be different with boys.”
And truly it must be, if Tom, as he is doing now, can wipe the snot off his nose with his glove, look at it, wipe it on his pants without a second thought for the bandana in his pocket.
“Well, actually, we don’t even have a mirror in the house.”
“Are you joking?”
“It isn’t a moral statement of any kind, we’ve just never had one.”
“How do you know what you look like when you go somewhere?”
“We look in a window, or we ask each other. Liz used to say, before she would go to town, ‘Well, do I look like a person who’s going to be stopped and searched by the welfare department?’ ”
Lydia doesn’t say anything. Will this be what offends her, finally?
I say, “I mean, for us, the point is to stay above a certain disreputable level, not to attain some fashion standard.”
“My mama would love it.” She smiles, this time at me rather than at Annabel.
I say, “Do you want to skate? Don’t you think we should give these kids some competition? Besides, my ass is freezing.”
“You go ahead. I’m not much of an athlete.”
I stand up and shout, “Hey! Let’s play tag! I’ll be it!” I slither onto the ice, find my footing, and go at once for Tom, who is nearer. He almost evades me by stopping suddenly and turning, but I whip around and tag him. He goes for Annabel, then me, then Annabel again. When he touches her she screams, but leaps after him at once, almost catching him. I stand with my back to the pair of them, acting nonchalant. She chases him for a moment, then turns and tags me. Instantly I tag her back, as if we were evenly matched, and she glances up at me, not smiling, her face registering recognition of the antagonism between us. She skates after Tom, at first languidly, then quickly. He stumbles on a nick in the ice and she catches him and tags him. He tries to crawl away and they start laughing. They are children—the telling sign is that touching one another means nothing.
In the woods by the pond, hanging over an old maple stump, is the tractor-tire inner tube we use in the summer. It is partially deflated with the cold, but Tom grabs it and throws it across the ice, at Annabel. As it passes her, she sits in it and slides a foot or two, and then he is upon her, spinning her around and around. She staggers up and thenwrests it away from him. He wipes his nose on his sleeve and churns after her. She pushes the inner tube across the pond, screaming. When he is just behind her, she swings it around and knocks him down with it. Lydia is on her feet at once, but Tom is up, laughing, chasing Annabel screaming across the pond. She is skating fast, her arms swinging. As she twists to look back at him, I see again how beautiful she is—broad shouldered, lithe, naturally strong—and I think, Catch her, catch her, wash her face with snow! I am as hostile and angry as I have been in years. He does not catch her, but she comes to the indistinct edge of the ice, and goes sprawling in the snow.
Once in a while, one is instantly punished. I am punished. She lies still. Under the snow could be rocks, jagged, unyielding. It is hard to remember. Tom is laughing and gasping. Lydia is still sitting down. That anger I felt a second ago is as lost to me, perhaps as fatal to her, as a stone loosed from a slingshot. There is another second, in which the breeze lifts Tommy’s hat and carries it a yard or two across the ice, red on white. And then Lydia and I are kneeling in the snow at the edge of the pond and Annabel is pushing herself out of it with her arms. She is slow. Lydia, across from me, takes the child’s face in her hands. She says, “Playing a little rough, sweetie pie?”
Annabel sobs.
Lydia lowers her voice, to get the girl’s attention. “Does it hurt somewhere? Open your mouth.”
She opens her mouth. There is blood around her teeth.
“Did you hit your teeth on something?”
Annabel sobs. Lydia turns her over, onto her lap. I begin feeling around the body print for stones.
“Annabel, talk to me.”
“I bit my tongue.”
“Did you hit your head on anything?”
“There don’t seem to be any projecting stones.”
Annabel shakes her head. “It’s just my tongue. Don’t let the blood get on my sweatshirt!” This last she cries out in a near panic. I pack together a handful of clean snow. “Put this in your mouth. That will stop the bleeding.” She takes the snow, holds it politely in her hand.
“Put it in your mouth, sweetie,” says Lydia. “He’s right.”
She cries, but she puts it in her mouth.
Fifteen minutes later, as we are climbing the path
back to the house, we begin exchanging self-blame. I say, “I shouldn’t have wound them up like that, playing tag.” Lydia says, “I saw the edge of the pond coming. I should have shouted to her.” I say, “I saw they were getting rough, and I should have said something.” Lydia says, “I hate to be the kind of mother who’s always saying be careful and watch out.”
“What would your mama say?”
She laughs. “ ‘Any bones broken?’ and ‘Can she walk on it anyway?’ ”
I laugh.
“I shouldn’t make a story out of Mama, but she’s tough—right, Annabel?” Annabel nods, pacified but shaken. At the house, Liz has whole-wheat buns cooked upside down with dried apricots and maple sugar. Annabel won’t even taste one.
5. February
A few days later, it occurs to Liz and me simultaneously that Lydia and Annabel’s visit only seems to have been routine, that we had better discuss it in light of the autumn’s events, which now seem unpleasant but distant. The dread I felt, in particular, of a mysterious but inevitable disintegration, has proved groundless. Doesn’t the Harrises’ visit prove that some sort of assimilation has taken place? Didn’t we demonstrate to Tom through our actions and our words that Lydia and Annabel were like any other friends or acquaintances, perfectly acceptable and welcome, different in no way? After Tom goes to bed, we sit by the stove and catalogue the signs:
