Chilly Scenes of Winter Read online

  “How did they get there?” Charles asked.

  “You don’t know that? I thought you already knew that.”

  Charles had asked his father that question before, when he was sitting on a stool in his father’s workroom. His father said: “I guess you’ve heard of screwing?” Charles had not. He nodded that he had. Charles’s father gave him a nut and a bolt. “Imagine that this is you,” he said, pointing to the bolt. His father gave it a twirl. Charles took it back from him and tried to twirl it, but he dropped the bolt. His father thought that was very funny.

  Charles’s gift to his new sister was a package of four number two Unger’s Westover pencils (yellow). He put them on the mattress under her feet. Later he took them back and used them.

  Charles liked his father. He died suddenly, at thirty-nine, on the bus coming home from work. He has foggy recollections of Pete at the funeral. Pete worked with his father. When his father died, Pete came over one evening with a bag of oranges. He came other evenings, too, at his mother’s invitation, bringing with him apples, grapefruit, pears, and finally boxes of Whitman’s chocolates, flowers, and a briefcase with his pajamas and toothbrush. One night not long after his mother married Pete, the fuses blew. Pete climbed downstairs and called up a lot of questions. He couldn’t fix it. Charles went down to help, carefully trying one fuse, then another, just as Pete had. “Could your Dad fix the fuses?” Pete asked. “Yes,” Charles said. Pete had cursed and beat his hands on the cinder block wall above the fuse box until they were bloody. Another time when Susan took some of Pete’s wood to make arms for a snowman, Pete pulled the wood out, spanked her with it, made her look out the window at the snowman as she got her spanking.

  “If he’s at the hospital, he’s sure to want us to hang around to go to dinner with him. We’re not going to do it,” Charles says.

  “I feel sort of sorry for him,” Susan says.

  “You can go to dinner with him if you want.”

  “No. I’m not going to go to dinner with him.”

  “You just feel sorry for him.”

  “I do. She’s crazy almost all the time now. And something you don’t know. This will really make you feel sorry for him. He thought she’d be less depressed if they got out more, so he signed them up for six months of dancing lessons. She wouldn’t go, and he couldn’t get his money back, so he went alone the first night. He said they were all old people, and he didn’t go back either.”

  “He’s a jackass,” Charles says.

  They are only a few blocks from the hospital. It has started to snow.

  “I’ll just take what I can get,” Charles says. “We can walk.” He pulls into a parking place.

  “I don’t want to get out,” Susan says.

  “She’s okay. She can probably come home.”

  “This is a lousy vacation,” Susan says.

  “We’ll have a turkey on New Year’s Day. We’ll have Sam over.”

  “I don’t even like turkey.”

  “We’ll have a ham.”

  “You’re always thinking about food.”

  “Susan. Get out of the car.”

  “Do you love me?” Susan says.

  “What the hell are you talking about? Will you please get out of the car?”

  “You curse all the time. Can’t you answer me?”

  “Of course I love you. You’re my sister.”

  “You don’t act like you love me. It seemed when I came back like I’d never left because nobody missed me.”

  “Susan. I work five days a week at a lousy job and miss my lover at night. On the weekends I go out and get drunk with Sam, and then I get sick. Your mother gets sick all the time and calls me in the middle of the night and at work. I’m just not in a very good mood.”

  “Well, it shouldn’t be like that. You should do things you enjoy.”

  “I don’t have any money. It’s all I can do to pay the bills and buy Sam drinks, because he doesn’t have any money either.”

  “But you could get that girl back.”

  “I can’t get her back. She’s not coming back. Christ.”

  “You curse all the time.”

  Charles opens his door, gets out, and closes it. Susan’s door does not open. He goes around to her side of the car, bends over, puts his mouth against the window. “Get out or I’ll kill you,” he says. She opens the door.

  “You’re in a strange mood,” he says. “When I was growing up this would have been called ‘an identity crisis.’ ”

  “You always try to make yourself seem older than you are. Why do you do that?”

  “I guess on second thought you’re a little sure of yourself to be having any sort of crisis.”

  “Were you nice to that girl? If you criticized her all the time, that’s probably why she left you.”

  “Stop talking about her. It’s depressing me.”

  “What did she look like? Then I’ll stop talking about her.”

  “She was pretty tall. Maybe five-nine. She had long brown hair. Blond. Brownish-blond. She was the librarian in the building I work in.”

  They go up the steps to the hospital, across the circular drive, and through the revolving door. There are brown plastic sofas everywhere. Charles puts his hand on Susan’s shoulder and guides her to the left, where several women in white uniforms sit behind a desk. He asks his mother’s room number, thanks the woman, and guides Susan toward the elevators. To the right, down a short corridor, is a chapel. There is no one in it.

  “You meant it, huh? You really aren’t going to ask anything else.”

  They get in the elevator. He stands to one side, pushing floor numbers for the people who enter. It’s a slow day—only one man in a gray overcoat, one man in a brown jacket, a teen-age girl with a yellow ski-jacket and hiking boots, and a fat oriental nurse.

  Their mother’s room is the first to the left when they get off the elevator. She shares it with another woman, who is white-haired and fat, a little older than their mother. Both women are asleep. Charles and Susan look at each other, then back out the door.

  “I’ll talk to a nurse,” Charles whispers. Susan follows him. At the nurses’ station, Charles asks how his mother is. The nurse says that a doctor will talk to him about what she calls “her condition.” He asks to see the doctor. The doctor isn’t in yet. When will he be in? The nurse thinks two o’clock. She calls it “P.M.” She has square, shiny fingernails and a perfectly round, auburn bun. She looks down at sheets of paper. All Charles can see is her neck. She has a long neck, fairly thin, skin quite pale. He asks if the doctor will call him. He will. He leaves his number. They do not go back to the room.

  “If we stick around, Pete will show up. She looked okay. As long as she’s not hooked up to anything she’s okay.”

  Susan walks beside him silently. They push the “down” button for the elevator and wait a long time. A woman in a wheelchair rides past. She has on a flowered bathrobe and pink slippers with embroidered flowers on them. A flowered scarf holds her hair back.

  “Let’s do something today,” Charles says.

  “What do you want to do? What about Elise?”

  “Elise. Hell. I forgot Elise.”

  “Couldn’t she come?”

  “Sure. Sure she could come. I just forgot about her.”

  “You don’t like her, do you?”

  “Not much. Do you?”

  “She lives on my floor. She came here because her mother’s an alcoholic.”

  “Your mother’s an alcoholic.”

  He opens the car door for Susan. He unlocks his own door, sits down, and laughs.

  “I can’t think of anything nice to do today,” he says.

  Susan rubs the moisture off the side window with her hand, looks out at the slush.

  “In answer to your question,” she says, “I don’t like her very much. One of the guys I used to go with lived with her when they were freshmen.”

  “So what’s she doing here?”

  “She asked i
f she could come.”

  “Maybe we’ll like Elise better if we can think of something to do with her.”

  “Do you think Mom would ever really kill herself?” Susan asks.

  “I don’t think so. She always says that.”

  “She looked like Esther Williams when she was younger,” Susan says. “She’s been old for so long.”

  “She’ll get a lot older. She won’t kill herself.”

  “We should have awakened her.”

  “We can go back tonight.”

  “Maybe we should have called Pete in Chicago.”

  “What should we have done? Called every hotel in Chicago? I should say every whorehouse.”

  “I don’t think he does that.”

  “I don’t care if he does it or not. I don’t know why I said it.”

  Charles turns on the radio. Janis Joplin is singing the “la-de-dah, la-de-dah-dah” section of “Bobby McGee.” Janis Joplin is dead. Susan is nothing like Janis Joplin. Susan speaks in precise, clipped rhythms, combs her hair into two carefully brushed sections (part down the middle), does what is expected—or what is unexpected behind people’s backs. Susan does not drink Southern Comfort.

  “Did you like Janis Joplin?” Charles asks.

  “She was okay.”

  “She was great,” Charles says. “All that flapping fringe and that wild hair and those big lips …”

  “I guess men find her more attractive than women do,” Susan says.

  “That was so great—how she left all that money for a party in her honor when she died.”

  “I hope she doesn’t kill herself,” Susan says. “We should have awakened her.”

  Charles makes a left turn, pulls up in front of a car that is coming out of a parking place.

  “I’m taking you to a Mexican restaurant,” Charles says. “It’s a great place.”

  “I’m not very hungry.”

  “Come on,” he says. The song is over. Janis Joplin is dead. Jim Morrison’s widow is dead.

  The restaurant has round wooden tables and place mats with the sun on them. There is a blue glass vase with dried grasses in it. A hippie in a white T-shirt and jeans gives them menus.

  “The chiles rellenos are great,” Charles says. “And black beans.”

  “Fine,” she says.

  “Try to act enthusiastic. She’s not going to kill herself. This is your vacation.”

  “This is your vacation,” she says.

  He is instantly depressed. He orders the first of four Bass Ales with his chiles rellenos. After lunch they decide to go to the art gallery, but on the way there they pass a porn movie and park and go there instead. Charles is a little uncomfortable being there with his sister, but he’s also pretty drunk. He spends the first five minutes of the film looking around the audience. It’s maddeningly light in the theater. His attention wavers between two light-haired boys two rows in front of them and the woman on the screen, caressing the neck of a Great Dane. He thinks that it is all predictable—the movie, the audience, the rest of his vacation. He wishes his father were alive; at least, then, somebody could get a few laughs out of him. If he tells Sam that he took his sister to a porn movie Sam will laugh at him. Sam. Elise. Janis. The Great Dane.

  “What did you mean before when you said she was an alcoholic?” Susan says, walking up the aisle.

  “Can’t anything get your mind off her?” Charles asks.

  Susan looks down, watching her feet leaving the theater.

  “She’s a heavy drinker,” Charles says. “I was just exaggerating.”

  “What do you think happened to her all of a sudden?” Susan asks. “You know—she dyed her hair and started wearing those jersey things.…”

  “If you want to know what I really think, I think that one day she just decided to go nuts because that was easier. This way she can say whatever she wants to say, and she can drink and lie around naked and just not do anything.”

  “Maybe when my sister died it did something to her.”

  “And it took nineteen years to register?”

  “How long has she been crazy?”

  “She was crazy when you graduated from elementary school, and that was … seven years ago.”

  “Maybe when he died …”

  “Oh, who the hell knows? I notice you’re not so concerned that you stick around here to go to school. She calls me almost every night. Or every day at work. How can I sleep? How can I work? I don’t know what to do.”

  “Doesn’t she talk to Pete?”

  “She talks to Pete and then she gets on the horn to me. Sometimes they fight when she calls. She just dials the number and lays the phone on the table, and I pick it up and hear them screaming.”

  “We ought to go home. The doctor must be trying to reach us.”

  “Let’s go to a bar,” Charles says. “Then we can go back to the hospital.”

  “But the doctor won’t be there again. We have to wait for his call.”

  Charles acknowledges defeat, but his shoulders feel very heavy when he shrugs them. He stops at a liquor store for a six-pack of beer to drink as he waits. He drives home slowly. He sulks. He realizes, with surprise, that he has forgotten to smoke all day. He decides to give up smoking.

  There is laughter as he puts the key in the front door. Sam is laughing. There is a pile of clothes in the living room. Charles looks out the front door for Sam’s car. Sam is laughing. Susan looks embarrassed.

  “Goddamn it,” Charles says. He squats and takes a can out of the six-pack, opens it, and has a drink. He offers up the can. Susan stiffens.

  “I thought she was leaving today,” Charles says.

  “Come on,” Susan says. “I’m not going to stay and listen to this.”

  “Well, what are we going to do? Go back to the hospital without having talked to the doctor?”

  “I just don’t want to be here.”

  “We could go over to Laura’s, and you could tell her what a swell guy I am, and I could get her back.”

  “Come on,” Susan says.

  “Come where?”

  “We can go to a bar. That’ll please you.”

  “It would please me to stay here. But your friend is at it with Sam.”

  “Sam’s your friend. You always do that.”

  Charles rubs his hand across the back of his neck. He is getting tired. He is tired. He picks up the rest of the beer and follows Susan out of the house.

  “You drive,” he says. “I’m tired.”

  “Where shall I go?”

  “To the bar. And you’re to blame if it doesn’t make me happy, because you said it would.”

  Donovan is singing “Sunshine Superman” on the car radio. Mellow Yellow. Charles’s car is yellow. It is an old yellow car with the trunk bashed in. He has nightmares in which he is thrown forward, into nothing. His car was hit from behind while he was stopped at a red light. A diplomat named Waldemere something-or-other did it. The diplomat was enraged. He showed Charles his license: “American driving license,” he said. “Worthless.” He wrote his name, embassy, and number in huge black letters on a napkin he got out of his car. On the other side of the napkin was a leaping fish. In the nightmare, Charles always screams. When he was hit, he just said, “Ugh.” He and Laura were going to get married. They were going to have a dog from the pound. By now, that dog is dead. She said that she always had cats; now she wanted dogs. He agreed. She said that it was corny, but she wanted to go to Bermuda. He said that he knew how to snorkel and would teach her. They both drank Jack Daniel’s on ice. He kept a bottle in his refrigerator, and when she was at his house they drank it straight. She had brownish-blond hair. Most women get upset if you can’t tell if their hair is brown or blond. She didn’t. He settled on brownish-blond in his own good time. She told him that Lauren Hutton had a wedge she put between her front teeth sometimes when she was photographed, and pointed it out on a Vogue cover photo. For that matter, she told him who Lauren Hutton was. Before Laura he loved thre
e other girls: one of them he stopped loving, one he continues to sort of love, but she was no good for him, and the other one he never thinks about. Laura was the best of them. Laura made a dessert out of cognac and fresh oranges. A soufflé. Her cookbooks are still all over the house. He often craves that dessert, and the recipe is probably in one of those books, but he can’t bring himself to look. He wants to think of it as magic. For the same reason, he never read a book about Houdini that Sam gave him for his birthday. He lies to Sam, says that he has read it. “What an amazing man Houdini was,” he says to Sam. If she had married him and they had gone to Bermuda, he would still have a little tan left now. His arms are winter white. She gave him clogs. They are too loud; he is too conscious of them—he won’t wear them. But he wears the undershirts. He can’t tell them from his old ones. In a fit of depression, he once thought of unraveling the labels in the back because hers had some little gold rooster on the label. He could just throw all those out. And the cookbooks. He will never throw either out. Even the clogs. His house is full of her things. There are toenail scissors in the bathroom, photo-booth pictures of them on the kitchen cabinet. Sam says that he should call her again, too. Houdini miraculously breaks chain! Charles calls Laura! He lacks nerve.

  “That bar,” Charles points.

  “That looks awful.”

  “It’s okay. I’ve been there.”

  Susan turns down a side street and coasts along, looking for a parking place. It is almost rush hour. Traffic is heavy. She finds a place at the end of the street.

  “Lucky,” she says. She parks the car and gets out. Charles sits there, imitating Susan earlier in the day. She comes to his window. “Out or I kill you,” she says.

  “That wouldn’t be so bad,” he says.

  They get the last two seats at the bar. It is a long bar with red plastic bar stools and bowls of peanuts.

  “What are you majoring in?” he says to Susan, and feels like a fool because a man next to him overheard. He considers following it up by asking Susan to see his etchings. Of course he can’t take her home. Sam is screwing a woman in his bedroom. He had planned on a nap, but now he is balanced on a bar stool, making silly conversation.