Girls (20 page)

“Truman? You kidding me?”

“I’m only guessing,” I said, gesturing to Berberich that he could leave, “but Truman’s a running dog of fascism, right?”

When I got home, it was snowing hard again. I didn’t want to be inside alone, so while the dog had his little freedom romp, I sat in the kitchen and put on the greasy old cross-country boots and used cold wax on the skis instead of heating it. I made sure the flashlight was bright, I stuck a light scarf of Fanny’s in the pocket of my parka, and I fed the dog. He smelled the boots, I guess, or he read my intentions, the way he so often does. Twice when he went to the door, I had to send him back to his food. When he was done, we went outside. On the steps of the porch, I clamped myself into the skis. He checked me out, tore off in the wrong direction, came back, jumped, somehow, sideways in the air, went in a different wrong direction, then came back and waited, panting hard, for me to lean forward on my poles, imitating a man who stretches before skiing.

I headed for the field that lay to the north of the house and the west of the woods below us. It was a little sticky at first, and I was a little creaky, but I needed to work away the soreness of my arms, real or imagined, that I’d felt since beating on William Franklin. After a while, I caught something that reminded me of the old push-and-release rhythm, and though I probably panted more loudly than the dog, I went through the thick snow, and into the snow that was falling, with the mixed purpose you feel when you’re skiing well crosscountry. You have the effort that makes you think you’re pursuing something, and you have no real destination, so you aren’t worried about progress. You just row away with your arms and you step into
the slide and you let it go, and everything’s focused for you in your knees and, of course, breathing, which wasn’t all that easy that night, what with the cold and the years and the defiantly bad conditioning.

We went over the top of a fence post I knew separated our land from the acreage of a field cut for hay by a local farmer. We were on snow at least four feet high, maybe five. The dog had started out ahead of me, predicting my moves, correcting for them, and cutting the start of a trail for me. By now, since, like me, he was no kid, he trotted behind me, usually, letting me break the wind and set the pace. My eyes were used to the dark, my ears were numb from the cold and the wind, and I couldn’t feel too much of the rest of my face. My body was sweat-wet up and down. I stopped to tie the scarf over the top of my head, covering my ears. I knotted it under my chin and put my watch cap back on. Then I skied over onto the farmer’s hay field and went straight ahead.

I pushed on for a very long time. I didn’t want to look at my watch, but I felt it had been a long time since I’d covered my ears. My knees were aching now, but that was all right. My thigh muscles burned. Even my shoulders and arms were jumping with charley horse. I kept going. It reminded me of the runs in basic training and of the long humps with a sixty-pound pack. You got to a point where something flared up and roared for a while and then was gone, flushed out and vaporized, and you felt lighter, even if you hurt, and you knew you’d get to the end and be all right. At the finish, before your body caved in, you felt better than you had at the start.

I thought, See how good you can make yourself feel with a little work and a lot of misery? Try and do that for someone else, I thought.

I looked down as I forced the slide-ahead, slide-ahead rhythm, and I saw my skis etching lines. Ahead of me, there was nothing but snow falling very hard and dense, like a coarsely woven curtain, and snow heaped on the ground on either side, burying the snow that had fallen for weeks. I stopped and turned in my tracks because I knew you can lose yourself and die a hundred feet from your house in a storm like this. I looked behind me, expecting to see the tracks go back to a vanishing point, but I couldn’t see where I’d been. I saw a
big snow-covered dog with icicles of slobber at his mouth and happy eyes, a gentle fellow of huge heart who shamed me daily by believing me important. And, behind him, I saw nothing. That was what was around me. I turned in a hurry, hoping to find the forward edges of my tracks, but they were gone, too. I headed into what I thought was the nothing ahead of me that I should be pointed toward, and of course the dog came, too.

Archie would ask me something clever and psychological about what I thought I might be sliding away from. But Archie wasn’t with me, and I didn’t feel honor-bound to answer questions. Questions are what you have in the house where you live. Outside, where it gets a little snowy and you need a sense of direction, you don’t do questions. You just slide ahead. I’d have said that to someone asking something. But there wasn’t anyone with me except a dog who would run on stumps, if you chopped his legs off, to keep up with me. My face was frozen now, and I knew I ought to be heading away from the weather. You make sergeant that way, pushing off into something a little dangerous in a headstrong way and suddenly feeling more than thinking it’s time to make believe you’re smart.

I cut farther west, where I knew we’d come across an old right-of-way that the farmer’s hands used for hay wagons. The roadway would be under snow, of course, but I thought I’d see the space in the trees that the hedgerow made—where the path was cut—against the green glare of the farmer’s barnyard lights. Mostly, I saw darkness and the whirl of snow. I decided not to use the flashlight, because unless the wind is kind to you, the snow seems to blow straight into the light and all you see is snow and not the way you need to go.

Looking forward and mostly down, and seeing mostly snow, and after a while that means you see nothing, I expected to think about Hannah or Fanny or both of them at once. That was what usually happened. I thought very briefly of Rosalie Piri, and I thought it was something about her littleness mixed in with her smile, which was so grown-up and maybe had to do with sex. I was happy to be thinking of sex. I hadn’t in any significant way for a long time. I wondered. If she was stretched out naked on a bed, watching a man, say me, walk
toward her, would she have those little tightened breasts? Would she smile that wicked smile? Would I worry about being too heavy for her? Would I lie down beside her? Would I cover her over with me?

I didn’t have the wind to talk, but I still said, “No!”

I crooked my neck, and I wondered what it was I’d said no to. You go out on cross-country skis on a very bad night in a very bad month of several bad years, and you start shouting “No!” and you realize there is a good deal you might be shouting it about.

I wondered if a man lay beside her or upon her and it was the first time together for them whether she would flush red, and whether the flush would stain the pale flesh of her chest, and whether she would cover her eyes the way she had. Maybe she would reach with those thin, small arms, I thought, and cover his.

First I saw a low glare, and then I saw the silhouette of the hedgerow. I had let us drift east, so I corrected and, not permitting myself to stop, I took us toward the right-of-way and then the narrow road it emptied into. I was hoping the town had plowed it, and we had a little luck because the snow, despite that day’s fall, was plowed and packed and tamped enough for me to kick out of my bindings and stick the skis over my shoulder and walk, very slowly, up the hill and back to the house. It took over an hour of steady walking, I figured, to get there. The dog was bushed. I had almost caught my breath by the time we were home.

Fanny’s car was there. I left the skis on the porch and went in, calling for her. She was at the table. I said, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong. Hello. I came home.”

“It’s early,” I said.

“It’s nine o’clock at night. Where were
you
?”

“You first, as soon as I get dry clothes on.” I dumped my shirt and pants and underwear directly into the washer and, shivering, threw in more dirty clothes, tossed in the soap, and started a wash. I ran upstairs, toweled off, dressed, added a cotton sweater over my flannel shirt, and went back down in my woolen socks. Fanny had heated a pot of chicken broth, and I poured myself a cup and sat with her. The dog was lying near his half-empty water dish, panting double time, his tongue stiff and very long.

“He’s too old for you to work him out so hard,” Fanny said. “Where’d you go? What’d you do?”

“We did a cross-country run—well, a shuffle. Down the back field, over to the hay field, across to the old farm road and back up—without skiing, just limping—on Taft Road to the main road and home.”

“I didn’t know you had that much left,” she said. Either I had turned only a few lights on or she had turned some off. She sat in the semidarkness, sipping at her soup, sitting in the straight-backed way that told me she had crossed her legs beneath her on the chair. It would take me two days, with pulleys and levers, to get my legs up like that. She looked square-shouldered, competent, not as frail as I knew she really was.

“I don’t believe the returns are in from the outer precincts about what’s left,” I said. “And I may not walk tomorrow.”

“Why’d you go?”

“Well, I don’t know. You know. I just … went. But why did you come home before the shift was over?”

“Same. Just … came home.”

“What’s wrong, Fanny?”

“I missed you. I felt like I hadn’t seen you for years.”

“Isn’t that why you took the shift?”

She drank some soup. “I wish I smoked,” she said.

“It’s great when you don’t know what to say. You light up, you do the little business with the lighter or the match, the this and that that smokers have. I miss it.”

“I miss you,” she said.

I looked at my soup, saw soup, looked up, saw Fanny, didn’t know where to look next. She blew her nose and he thumped his tail.

“I miss us both,” I said.

Then she said, “I miss all three of us.”

“But you didn’t walk off the shift—”

“I told them I didn’t feel well.”

“You didn’t walk off the shift, and leave the hospital without its most experienced ER nurse, just so you could come home and say it was a bad thing Hannah, you know—”

“Died,” she said.

I said, “Died. That’s right.”

“But why not? Isn’t that a thing we need to say?”

“Archie Halpern would think so.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“I mostly know what I think about things from you and from Archie. So, yeah. I guess so. Yeah. I feel shitty, too. How’s that?”

“So now you feel better because you said so,” she said, smiling even though her eyes were filled and her cheeks were streaked. She said, “There. It’s what a nurse knows how to do.”

“Is this what playing nurse means? I always thought it meant, you know—”

“Sex,” she said.

“Ah.”

“Remember it?”

“Sure,” I said. “We used to have it. I think we had some several months ago. Well. I guess I wouldn’t
quite
call it that.”

“That was not your fault,” she said.

“That’s right. I knew that.
You
were the one with the erection and
you’re
to blame for losing it,” I said.

“You don’t do
blame
about hard-ons.”

The dog slugged the floor with his tail.

“Fanny, I wouldn’t know one of those right now if it knocked me off of my chair.”

“I understand,” she said.

I didn’t know what was in my head, but I was afraid to raise it and let her see my eyes, in case Rosalie Piri was in there looking out.

I shrugged, and she said, “I didn’t come home to make love, Jack.”

Trying not to look sneaky, I did raise my head, and I waited. She was waiting, too. I said, “What, Fanny?”

“Are we, do you think, are we ever going to be all right?”

I nodded hard. I said, “Damned right. Of course we are.”

“Do you have any idea when?”

“We’re getting there,” I said. “Don’t you think? Really?”

Nurses look directly at it, and they name it out loud. She shook her head.

“But maybe,” I said. “Right?”

“If you want it to be maybe, we can say that.”

“Is it worth coming off the shift early to come home and say maybe?”

She said, “Jack.”

The dog thumped his tail.

I said, “So, then, maybe. All right?”

“All right,” she said.

“Really, though. A definite maybe.”

She almost laughed. She shook her head. She finished her soup. I thought, as I stayed where I was, that somebody ought to walk around the table and hug this woman hard and just hold on.

W
E HAD THE USUAL
upstate January thaw so late in the season, it was two days away from March when temperatures went toward twenty, and people new to the region talked about early spring. Students forsook heavy coats, and some professors came to work in sport jackets with sweaters underneath and, of course, the long scarf wrapped around the neck and trailing down the back.

The dog got down to another level of dead creatures in the forest, and he came back on the second morning of the thaw with a bunch of loose but connected half-defrosted blue-brown flesh that he rolled on in the side yard. He tossed it in the air and chased it, dancing rigidly over it, back and forth, like an old brown rocking chair. Then he aimed his back at it and rolled around, his paws in the air, his back writhing. Occasionally, he took licks at it, then bites. When he came back in, I smelled him and sent him out.