In the bleak midwinter
Frosty winds made moan
Earth stood hard as iron
Water like a stone.
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter
Long time ago.
Laura settled into Mary Bernice’s chair. She sniffed at the tea and let the aroma become both warmth and wetness upon her cheeks. It felt like tears, though generally tears didn’t taste of peppermint.
A rare moment of—something—continued to fall over her. Outside, frosty winds were making moan again. A branch dropped on the metal palings that divided the Ciardi yard from that of old Mrs. Steenhauser the next street over.
The world wanted so hard to be poetic, and really it was only stupid.
Everything falling through the air. Baby owls, branches, snow on snow on snow. Airplanes. A Bobby Vee record hurtling down Stairwell B at Driscoll School.
Where would she fall from in the end, she wondered—how high need she climb to find out how steep is the fatal fall?
She’d been here about five years now, more or less. Ovid and Isabella Ciardi were growing old as she was growing up. Laura could do the counting backward and figure it out perfectly if she wanted, but she was ashamed still to be using her fingers to count on.
This house on Van Pruyn Place. Home and yet not home; more a here than a home. Even with her own room upstairs, and a blue chenille bedspread, and a nightstand with a picture of her brother Marco on it. Her own bathroom with its pink tiles and black trim. She didn’t even have to close the door to her bathroom if she didn’t want, not since the governess left a few years ago. Nobody came upstairs anymore.
Not very like home, but the most home she had had for the past years, ever since her mother. Since her mother.
But she wouldn’t allow that thought to fall upon her. She twitched her head and, Sunday or not, said, “Damnation.”
If she could tell what she had done, maybe she could think of a way to undo it. If she could write it out? But probably not—she hadn’t been able to produce a paragraph about herself and how she had spent her summer, not once in five years. Something blocked her words from escaping through the pen.
Still, she could see Maxine Sugargarten. Weird stuck-up alluring Maxine. Laura could see herself at the top of the flight of steps, holding Maxine’s record album in its sleeve. Maxine had been going on for ten days about how her brother was coming home for Christmas. She had gotten him Bobby Vee’s record album called Take Good Care of My Baby. It wasn’t such a terrific album, and wasn’t even new anymore, but Maxine had been carting it around the halls and showing it off and talking about her big brother coming home until Laura could stand it no longer.
Put the disaster in order, she announced to herself. If you can arrange it in your mind as it happened, maybe you can predict the next step forward. Maybe even manage to take that step. If there is one.
There was always a before to every story. “What is past is prologue,” fluted Miss Parsley in Composition, period three every Monday morning. “Who have you become over the weekend? Who are you now? Tell me something that happened to you since seventh period Friday. What happened. Make me see it! Let me be able to hand your paragraph straight to a certain Mr. Alfred Hitchcock. Supply so many visual details and human gestures that he can set up a camera and record your incident without delay. Short is good! But do it right away! Be readable now. And remember your ending: it’s most important. What does your experience mean? What does it signify? Change, growth, understanding, realization?”
Laura could tell her first paragraph to herself any time of the day or night. She was good at looking and seeing. She just couldn’t write it down. As for the conclusions, forget it. What things meant was impossible to guess or say, even in her secret soliloquies.
Garibaldi kneaded his way into Laura’s lap. She began to tell it as if she were the point of the story, but even Garibaldi yawned, as if it would be a stretch to expect him to care much about her travails.
Gym. Second period, Monday morning. At the end of the volleyball game, the girl had plunged into the locker room with the rest of the team. They had twelve minutes to shower, change, and be in English two flights up. The last one in the door of the English room at the start of third period on Mondays had to read aloud her “Past Is Prologue” paragraph. So the girl made sure she was never last. Ever.
Maxine Sugargarten blasting reports about her big brother returning from basic training for Christmas. Donna Flotarde as some sort of cheer squad behind her most of the time, and then Aarathi and Cindy and Mary Colleen O’Cassidy snaking around on the sidelines, too. They’d taken against Laura, to be sure. Oh, yes, long before the locker room, and the stolen record album. In the gym, in the halls, in assembly, everywhere.
Back when there were boys in class it hadn’t been so bad. Laura had been too quiet to pester. Boys equal noise. But after promotion from sixth grade at Driscoll, the boys had to go to Prentiss-Drake. In seventh grade, Driscoll became all girls. And once the camouflage of boys was cleared away, Laura’s status among her classmates devolved into being a sort of cafona from the back of beyond. Brought to light in order to make the other girls feel good about themselves. Laura, a half-orphan, stuck in a house with those ridiculous ancient Italian people.
Garibaldi looked up at her accusatorily. You had friends, said the cat. Don’t say you didn’t.
But she didn’t. The cat was wrong. Sure, two fourth-grade girls had looked up to Laura when she’d helped out in the art room that one time. They’d followed her around in the cafeteria for a while.
“On Saturday afternoon I went on a date with my boyfriend to see Birdman of Alcatraz at the rep,” said one of her volleyball teammates as they rushed into the shower last Monday morning. “We wanted to see To Kill a Mockingbird but it isn’t out till next week. What did you do over the weekend, Laura? Did you hang out with your fourth-grade fan club at the soda fountain? What fun!”
“Shut up,” said Laura, quietly; she could hardly even hear herself.
Usually she was so eager to be the first one to English that she skipped the showers, barely swabbing under her arms with a damp paper towel before getting dressed. But the girls in the locker room were feeling gangstery, maybe from holiday high spirits. As Laura turned to reach for her camisole, Aarathi opened the top of her liquid Prell and gave it a squeeze. Green globs jumped on Laura’s hair and shoulder blades. “Oh,” said Aarathi, nearly sneezing with joy. “What a disaster! So sorry, Laura. Quick, you have time to shower.”
She had no choice, and the other girls were half-dressed already. If she didn’t hurry, she’d be last. Then she’d have to admit out loud in Parsley’s class that she did nothing on the weekend but go to church, and with her elderly grandparents. Her imagination was rich, but her life straitjacketed, and panic seized up her mind in the best of times.
She had careered into the shower stall and turned on the hot water. Her hair was goopy. She snapped the curtain shut and powered up the hot. She could still make it; she was faster than everyone. Not until later did she remember the sound of a plastic-seated bench dragging across the floor tiles of the next stall. After her ski accident at Killington, Doll Pettigrew had been using the bench to balance herself in the shower. Laura should have noticed the scrape.