As Simple as Snow Read online

  12. Yoko Ono—walking on thin ice

  13. Billie Holiday—i’ve got my love to keep me warm

  14. The Handsome Family—cold, cold, cold

  15. The Durutti Column—snowflakes

  16. Bill Monroe & His Blue Grass Boys—footprints in the snow

  17. Tindersticks—snowy in f# minor

  18. Nico—winter song

  19. The Mountain Goats—snow crush killing song

  20. Belle and Sebastian—the fox in the snow

  21. Elliott Smith—angel in the snow

  22. Nick Drake—winter is gone

  Besides the CD, she gave me a portable shortwave. “It’s one of my father’s old ones,” she said. “He had to put some new parts in it, but it works. It’s kind of from the both of us. My father says that he’ll come over and help put up the antenna.” I gave her a copy of The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce. It was old, and the jacket was stained with coffee or something (“Maybe it’s blood,” Anna said), and inside were two strange drawings by a child or some crazy person. The first was on the back of the title page. It was a crude ink drawing of two people fighting or wrestling under a bridge or a tree limb. There was little detail, and lines started and ended randomly, or ran together, so it was hard to tell exactly what was going on. The two people (it could have been a man and a woman or a man and a child) looked terrified or crazy. The second drawing was on the inside of the back cover. It was slightly more accomplished, at least in some aspects. It was of a young girl, standing on the railing of a bridge, maybe, or the top of a tall building. She had on a nightgown or a long dress. She was looking up at the moon, and seemed to have tears running down her face. She had three pairs of arms; two arms were folded across her chest, two stretched in front of her, and the last two reached straight overhead, toward the moon.

  I didn’t know about the drawings when I bought the book, but Anna thought they were the best part. I also gave her a portrait of Edgar Allan Poe. It was a page torn from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Poe was looking straight off the page, with his dark jacket buttoned to the top, and a tie or scarf wrapped around the collar of his shirt, which was turned up and curled under his chin. He appeared to have a slight smirk under his dark moustache, as if he were keeping a secret. I’d found both gifts on eBay and outbid everybody. “I noticed you didn’t have Poe up on your wall,” I said.

  My brother took us bowling. His wife, Kate, stayed home with the kids. “You think we’d trust your mom and dad with them?” she said. Anna brought Claire with her. “You can’t bowl with three people,” she said. “Besides, I didn’t want to be the only freak there.” It was the only time I heard her refer to herself like that. I think she was nervous about meeting my brother, but Paul was all right. More than all right.

  We drove into Hilliker and went to SkyMor Lanes. “That might be the dumbest name I’ve ever heard for a business that has nothing to do with flying,” Anna said. “But I like it.”

  “It’s a great place,” my brother said. “Cheesy as hell.”

  SkyMor had twenty-seven lanes. If you know anything about bowling, you know that it’s impossible to have an odd number of lanes. The last lane was an actual lane, but it was only for show. There was only half a ball return there, sticking out of the wall, and only half a scoring table—it looked as if the wall had split the lane in two. It was meant to be something everyone would talk about, make the place famous. Maybe so, back when the place first opened, but I’d never heard about it. About three-quarters of the lanes were being used, and my brother requested the lane at the far end from the famous half-lane. There was no one down there. I thought he might be embarrassed by his two Goth guests, but he was trying to get us away from everyone else for another reason.

  We got our shoes at the counter. The old guy there was comatose; he didn’t even notice Anna and Claire; he barely raised his head as he sprayed a cloud of disinfectant into the green-and-red shoes (“For Christmas,” Anna said) and swapped them with ours. Bowling shoes are always stupid, but they looked even more ridiculous on Anna and Claire. “I should be a clown in the Goth circus,” Claire said. The three of us then went to pick balls while my brother wandered off.

  Anna chose a bright pink ball. “It’s like a big piece of bubble gum.” She wanted me to pick the same color.

  “I think I’ll stick with basic black for once,” I said.

  She tried out the bubble gum and threw a strike first thing. “Let’s count that,” she said.

  “It’s just practice,” I told her. “We’ve got to wait until my brother gets back.”

  Anna knew what she was doing, even though she said she had never bowled before. I commented that Claire bowled as if she had taken lessons, flute lessons. It was the first time I made Claire laugh.

  Paul came back with four bottles of beer. They were in the shape of bowling pins, which Anna thought was cute. “Do you guys drink beer?” We all nodded. “All right,” he said, “just be careful. We don’t want to get kicked out, and I don’t want to get arrested.” We hid our beers behind the pile of our coats on the row of orange and blue plastic chairs.

  Claire and Paul were on one team, and Anna and I were on the other. We killed them. Claire started with three gutter balls in a row. My brother tried to give her some pointers, but they didn’t lead to much improvement. Claire didn’t seem to mind—nobody did. We had beer, what did we care? Paul’s game got worse the more he drank, while Claire’s got better. I had the high score in the first game, so I teamed up with Claire, who had the lowest, for the second. We still won. The third and last game had Paul and me against Anna and Claire. We won, but barely. Paul had the lowest score of everyone. “I’m not used to drinking so much anymore,” he said. In the end he was the one who got drunk.

  He didn’t think that he should drive, so he gave the keys to Claire. Claire had her permit, and would get her license at the end of February. He slumped in the front passenger seat, and Anna and I sat in the back. “What’s the first thing you’re going to do?” my brother asked Claire. “Where are you going to drive?”

  “Let’s go to the city and see that TV psychic, Preen,” Anna said.

  “Maybe we’ll come back to SkyMor,” Claire said. She’d been flirting with my brother all night, teasing him and getting him to blush and laugh. He liked it.

  “Let’s make a list of all the people we want to run over,” I said.

  “That’s something Bryce would say,” Claire said.

  “I’ll say something else, then.”

  “Too late,” Anna said. “Mr. Devon is on the top of my list.”

  “Why Mr. Devon?”

  “He deserves to have a few things broken.”

  “Hey, is Mr. Kissler still there?” my brother said. We told him that he was. “We should go run him over. Claire, drive on over to his house. You can hit him with my car.” Claire ignored him and drove to Anna’s. She dropped her off and then drove to her own house.

  “Thanks for a good time,” she said, “and thanks for letting me drive. I hope I didn’t scare you too much.”

  “You look fine,” Paul said.

  Claire laughed. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know what you meant.” He sat in the passenger seat and watched her walk to the front door. She didn’t turn around but went straight inside. The light over the front door went dark, and Paul turned around and looked at me.

  “You drive,” he told me. I’d never driven before. “C’mon,” he said. “It’s easy. Besides, no one’s going to be out on the roads. Just take it easy.”

  It was a huge vehicle, and I was sure that I would wreck. I eased down Madder Lane and successfully made the turn onto Kennedy. I was heading home when Paul said, “Take me down by the school.”

  “We should get home,” I said. “Let’s not press our luck.”

  “Take me by the school. We shouldn’t get home right now, anyway. I need to sober up a little, or else I’ll be in trouble. You want me to be in troubl
e?”

  I turned down Sidgwick. A car was coming toward us. I didn’t know where to look; the lights were bright, and I couldn’t see the road very well. The driver honked as the car passed, so I thought I might have swerved toward it. “Your brights are on,” Paul said. He was resting his head against the glass of the passenger window. It probably felt nice and cool against his forehead. It should have been cool against my head; I should have been the one waiting around to sober up in the car. I didn’t like driving that much.

  “How do I turn them off ?” He told me. “When do I turn them off ?” He told me. “Why can’t you drive again?”

  “You’re doing fine,” he said.

  I pulled into the school parking lot. The building was dark. It looked menacing, a huge beast waiting to pounce. Paul sat up and stared at it too. I was sure he was thinking the same thing I was thinking, and would want to get away from it.

  “I can’t believe how tiny it looks,” he said.

  “Did you have people like Anna and Claire in school when you were there?” I asked.

  “You mean cute girls?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “We had them all—the jocks and the Goths, the punks and the geeks, the bandoids and the bussers and the stoners. Did I leave anyone out?”

  “Which one were you?”

  “I was a geek. I probably wouldn’t have admitted it at the time, but that’s what I was.”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “Not now,” he said. “It’s all those guys who did well, both in college and after. And the jocks, the guys the whole town fawned over, almost all of them ended up going nowhere. They peaked in high school. Erick and Derek Gurney were big football stars, that’s all you need to know about that. And the biggest geek in school was Bob Fesnor. He made fifteen million dollars before he was thirty.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He didn’t come back here, did he?” Paul kept looking at the dark windows of the school. “I may not come back anymore.”

  “Home?”

  “This place has nothing,” he said. “Mom and Dad are a joke. They don’t seem to care if we come up or not. They certainly don’t seem to want to have anything to do with their own grandkids, and they don’t appreciate the effort it takes for us to come up here. So the hell with it. They can come down and see us for once.”

  “They won’t.”

  He shrugged.

  “So you’re going to be like Joan, and I won’t see you anymore?” I couldn’t think of the last time I had said my sister’s name out loud. I didn’t want my brother to disappear that way.

  He looked at me, realizing what he was saying, or realizing how I was hearing it. “You don’t need Mom and Dad to come see us. You can come down anytime you want. You’re getting old enough to make your own decisions. Come down anytime. I’ll pay for it. This has nothing to do with you. I just can’t come back up here. You know Mom and Dad.”

  “They’re idiots.”

  “I don’t really want the kids to be around them. I’m truly afraid they’ll have an influence on them.”

  “I’m afraid I’ll wind up like them,” I said.

  Paul sighed. “There’s only so much you can do. You can’t escape your genes.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  My brother laughed. “You’ll be all right. Just don’t stay around. Get out of this shitty town as soon as you can.”

  I looked over at Paul. He didn’t look drunk. He hadn’t sounded drunk. I began to suspect that he had been sober enough to drive the whole time. I pulled out of the lot and drove us home. I actually got the hang of it and enjoyed it, felt confident and happy, perfectly content. I would tell Anna how great my brother was and how he had faked being drunk so Claire and I could drive, how he trusted me not to say anything to our parents, anything about him being drunk or me driving. It was our secret.

  Paul and his family left the next day, and I thought that would be the last time I would see my brother for a long time. He meant what he had said; he wasn’t coming back.

  new year’s eve

  The Tooles had two parties each year, one on the Fourth of July and the other on New Year’s Eve. Mr. Toole had worked as a lawyer in the city, and they had used their large house at the end of Garfield Road as a weekend retreat until he retired and they moved up here full-time. It was said that they were originally from Louisiana and had moved north after their son died. So it was just Mr. and Mrs. Toole in a sprawling gray house, with about seven acres of land they kept cleared and manicured so it looked like a park. They’d been having their legendary parties for almost twenty-five years. The Fourth of July party was open to the entire town; lines of cars would stretch for miles, down Garfield Road and then out onto Town Street and beyond. Mr. Toole roasted a few whole pigs on a huge outdoor grill; there were also shrimp boils and piles of corn on the cob. They supplied beer and wine and soda, and all the guests had to do was bring a side dish, salad, or dessert. Hundreds of people roamed around the Tooles’ acreage and ate and drank. A band played, starting around ten o’clock, usually after the younger kids had been taken home, and people would still be drinking and dancing the next morning.

  The New Year’s Eve party, however, was black-tie and by invitation only. A select group of fifty people were invited. My father used to play golf with Mr. Toole (they still might, but I never hear him mentioned), and my parents had been going to the party for the past fifteen years. My father still complained about having to wear his tux. “It’s the worst money I’ve ever spent on clothes,” he said. “I only wear it a couple of hours once a year.” He didn’t want to go, but if you turned down an invitation to the Tooles’, you weren’t invited back, and my mother loved going. It was her favorite night of the year. She always had a new dress for the occasion and shined brightly and happily on the glum dark arm of my father.

  The Caynes were attending for the first time, which was something of a sensation, since they’d been in town only a few months. They had become quite active and popular, the polar opposite of my parents. The event also meant that Anna’s parents and mine would be in the same place for hours together. “Your parents are going to hate mine,” I told her.

  “No they’re not. My parents get along with everybody.”

  “Mine don’t get along with anyone.”

  “So what you mean is that your parents are going to hate mine.”

  “Probably,” I said. “But only because mine are idiots. I wish they weren’t going.”

  I was glad that they were. It meant that our parents would be occupied for the night. My parents would probably leave the Tooles’ right after midnight, but even then, it would give Anna and me almost six straight hours together.

  A different person answered the door when I went to her house that night, an Anna I had never seen before. She was the person I had imagined she was before she moved to town, before she dressed like a Goth. She wore no makeup, and without the black eyeliner and lipstick her features were soft, powdery, as if she had been dusted with confectioner’s sugar. She had just washed her hair and hadn’t put in any of the usual stuff, and it too looked soft. She reminded me of a movie star, filmed through a soft-focus lens. We were an odder match than ever.

  She wore a dark green dress, not a formal prom type, but something fancier than the clothes I was wearing: brown corduroys, a blue button-down shirt (with the collar unbuttoned), and a black sweater. My boots and pants were covered with snow from the walk over. Her dress looked black at first, maybe because I’d seen her wear only black, and it wasn’t until she moved into the light of the room that I could see that it wasn’t her usual color. It was a slim, simple dress, with short sleeves and a black ribbon around the waist. She wasn’t wearing any shoes. Maybe she didn’t own anything other than her Doc Martens, or maybe she just wanted to show off the fact that the polish on her toenails matched her dress exactly.

  “I didn’t know everyone was going to dress up tonight,” I said.


  “You look fine,” she replied. “I thought that a little green in the dead of winter might be nice. Besides, I wanted to give you first look. I’m thinking about this image for the new year. Not the dress, necessarily, but the rest of it.”

  “Don’t change on my account.”

  “You don’t think it would make things easier?”

  “Not for me, and definitely not for you. Just be yourself. Isn’t that advice you’d give?”

  “How do you know that this isn’t myself ?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “How do you know that I don’t have a lot of different selves?”

  “A lot of people do,” I said. She wasn’t being confrontational, or argumentative, but I felt things could go that way very quickly.

  “Well, we’ll try it for one night anyway. You like it, though, right?”

  “I think you look great either way.” It was the dumbest thing to say, sure, but it was true.

  She poured two tall glasses of vodka, with a little cranberry juice to give it color, and took me into her parents’ bedroom. “I want to show you something,” she said. We walked over to a bay window with a built-in bench. Anna removed the cushion from the bench to reveal a mirror covering the seat of the bench. Directly above, on the ceiling of the bay window, was another mirror, of the same shape and size. “Look into it,” she said. I leaned over the bench mirror, and immediately my reflection multiplied, over and over, smaller and smaller.

  “Isn’t that the greatest thing?” she said.

  It was hypnotic. The number of reflections depended on the angle at which you approached the mirror: by moving back and forth you could collapse the image to a flat surface, or expand it to a deep, limitless canyon. That was the most fascinating view: looking nearly straight down, past the larger reflections near the surface and at some point deep within the reflections, which gave you the sensation of standing at the top of the world looking down at yourself looking up from the bottom of the world. “It’s like the bottom fell out of the mirror,” I said, “like it’s a crystal-clear ocean and you can see all the way to the bottom.”