The Ice Storm Read online

  Thanksgiving dinner at the O’Malleys, as Benjamin had often pointed out, was like waiting for the end of a ceasefire. Billy and her father would assume a guarded silence until the first drinks had been consumed. Then Billy would launch into his list of dissatisfactions beginning with, say, her father’s preposterous support for the House Un-American Activities Committee. Open disgust was not far away. Elena tried to interpret, mediate, and assuage; she tried silence and she tried slipping out to chat with the staff in the kitchen. It did no good. And then her mother would appear for dinner, having spent hours arranging herself, balancing between the spot where she couldn’t button a button because of tremors and where the double vision got the best of her. Elena’s mother would descend and the evening would really get under way. Holy mother of God, why did you even bother to attend? Will someone call for a bib, please? Or a stretcher? Maybe a stretcher is in order. Could we have a stretcher, please?

  At which Billy would fly into a rage. Because Billy and Elena’s mother were attached by more than drink. They were attached by their sadness and their lying and their self-pity. They died in the same year, the way lovers of long standing did. Margaret O’Malley’s liver succumbed, and Bill went down in a plane about six months later. Plaques commemorating their unhappy terms in this life adorned the stone wall in a lonely New England churchyard. And these plaques had been joined recently by one bearing her father’s name. He had supported Nixon right through Checkers, but the flimsy valves of his heart—tinkered with by the eminent cardiologists of the day—couldn’t survive Watergate. He died the day Cox was appointed special prosecutor, April 17.

  When Elena was small, she had played in her mother’s dressing room, where two mirrored walls faced one another. The reflections traveled back ceaselessly in that space. When Elena stepped into the purview of these mirrors, she too was reproduced innumerably. She was always trying to catch a glimpse of her incalculable selves. She stretched, she sensed, toward the origin of her family, into its pedigreed peeves and illnesses and delinquencies. But no matter how she tried to sneak around the margins of her reflection, to see the edges of that parade, her mirrored self shadowed her. In silence.

  So: Paul and Wendy and Benjamin. And Daisy Chain, the dog, presently sprawled—licking himself—on the library carpet. This little family had tightened around Elena. She put aside Masters and Johnson, marked with a New Canaan Bookshop bookmark—at the page concerning the onset of menopause, just by chance—and repaired to the kitchen. She threw light switches up and down the hall. Because of the oil embargo the British were working a three-day work week, but Elena was uncomfortable in darkness. Duraflame logs. She needed more. The President was pondering special powers to ration electrical resources. Sunday leisure driving was officially discouraged. The market had plunged fifty points this week. Three percent, Benjamin had said, only three percent.

  She thought of Janey Williams’s breasts, the perfect way she presented them, in a brassiere that probably carved tracks in her shoulders. Her breasts were large and rounded. This you couldn’t miss, through her lacy, flimsy chemises. Ripe and properly displayed, the way the men of Elena’s acquaintance liked them. Janey was not afraid of presentation, while Elena was, on the other hand, small and compact and reserved. But she was sexual and capable of abandon. The mistake Benjamin made—in assuming she was only one kind of person, a virgin bride of the Eisenhower years, a daughter of gentility—brought her as close to outrage as she came. She had read widely on the subject of personal growth. She wasn’t impervious to change. There was growth left in her. To pin her down, wriggling like a butterfly specimen, was a kind of violence.

  Still, when she had to be, she was a chef. She filled a saucepan from the tap, set it on the range, and immersed in it the brick of frozen peas. They were frozen into a small rectangular pool of yellow simulated butter. Then she exhumed the turkey carcass from its tomb in the fridge and set it on a cutting board. As dispassionately as any butcher, Elena aligned the hewn strips of turkey on each of three plates. Turkey the day after was the most heartbreaking protein she could imagine.

  In the den, the screen door opened. The announcement of bad conversation. The gales had begun to whistle around the side of the house and over the creek. As her husband slid the door closed, this howling hushed briefly. Shuffling into the kitchen, Benjamin and Wendy muttered hello like late arrivals at church.

  —Ten minutes, Elena said.

  These estimates were almost always folly.

  —Go dry off, Benjamin said to his daughter.

  The two of them, Ben and Wendy, were peeling off their footwear. The puddles extended around them in rivers across the kitchen floor, back toward the hall carpeting. They carried their drenched garments around the sink to the laundry room. Wendy stripped off her poncho and her pants and shook out her hair. In her panties, she stood dripping. It was one good thing Elena had done, she remembered; she had given birth to a great beauty.

  Ben followed Wendy back toward the stairs, and Elena followed Ben. They climbed the stairs in this order. Wendy commandeered the bathroom right away. There was the firm ping of the push-button lock.

  The hall was blue-gray and the master bedroom was blue-gray and the rug was a deeper shade of blue-gray and the curtains were a sort of blue-gray. The bedspread on the master bed was blue and red, checked. The light outside was blue-gray, and when Elena switched on a light by the bed it hardly did the trick. Benjamin had the last of his clothes off quickly. He piled them on the chair where he hung his suit pants overnight.

  Elena watched him from the edge of the bed.

  —Never guess where I found her, he said.

  He disappeared into the walk-in closet. The sound of his voice was husky among suits and gowns.

  —In the basement over at Janey and Jim’s. With that creep. Not even a television on. And they’re on the floor. Kid’s got his trousers down—I can see his little white cheeks pumping away. Got his pecker out there and everything.

  The Benjamin’s voice was muffled. The smell of naphtha and dry-cleaning chemicals. She could tell he was nervous.

  —He’s only partly on top of her, though. He’s partly on top of her and partly off. She’s still dressed. He’s flopping around like a fish on the deck and she’s just lying there.

  Benjamin poked his head out of the closet now and looked at his wife. She admired what was left of him, couldn’t help it, what was not consumed by uncertainty and heavy drinking and the ravages of adulthood with little exercise. In many ways, he was ugly, scaly, even repulsive. When he smiled, the effect was almost always lewd. It was getting hard to locate her affection in the midst of all this noise and dissolution and thoughtlessness, but she liked him sometimes anyway. It was hard to live next to someone and not come up with a little respect.

  —Should I dress for the party now, or should I dress after? Give me your—

  —Up to you, she said. I’d like to go early, though, and leave pretty soon after that.

  —I get you loud and clear. Your signal is coming in. Anyway, I don’t know what was in it for her, because she wasn’t giving him … she wasn’t giving him a hand job or anything.

  —Do you have to be so graphic?

  —I’m just telling the story, baby doll. She’s not giving him a hand job and she’s not, you know, grappling with the situation herself either. Probably too shy to do it to herself in front of the creep. I guess we should be glad about shyness. And I come down the stairs and I pause dramatically, like I’m the prosecutor or something, and then I really let him have it. You’ve never seen anyone rearrange their clothing so fast in all your life. Kid’s got the pants hiked up around himself, shoes and socks on, shirt carefully tucked in before I can say a word. Shirt sticking out of the fly and everything. He’s pretending to be absorbed in the TV Guide.

  Benjamin laughed. He was searching far and wide for a laugh.

  —Hey, you look nice, he said to her now, fixing a paisley ascot around his neck, zippering the blue-
and-gold—checkered pants. She knew she looked anything but nice. Familiar, maybe, kindly.

  —And?

  —And Wendy’s out of the way. She squirms away on the floor, puts some distance between her and the creep. So I started to yell and I called the kid I-don’t-know-what, told him I’d personally separate him from his manhood if I ever caught him with her again and that sort of thing. Wendy came home peacefully.

  Another laugh. A party laugh, trailing off precipitously. Elena watched him in the bathroom now, straightening the ascot. She waited a while before asking. She let it hang in the air with the menace of a grave diagnosis.

  —So what were you doing in the basement anyway?

  Only a slight hesitation:

  —Just dropping off a coffee cup. Jim left it, last time he was over. It was on the dash of the car. You were, you know, reading. I was just dropping off the cup.

  Benjamin emerged from the bathroom. Smiled. Spread wide his arms to announce his arrival.

  —Let’s eat, babe. I am cool. I am ready.

  She lifted herself, as though it were the greatest chore, from within the fold of the comforter at the end of the bed. It diapered her. And this was a great chore, too. Being lied to required such work.

  —Oh, right, she said. The mustache coffee cup. The one that was sitting on the dash.

  —Yeah, sure, he said. That’s the one.

  —That one.

  Benjamin nodded vigorously.

  —That one.

  Her husband simply laughed. As if the flimsiness of his deceits wouldn’t adhere to him.

  So they were back in the kitchen. Disappointment in the room like a sullen dinner guest. The peas bobbed in their sulfurous oil slick. All was ready. Wendy appeared behind Elena, wearing another pink turtleneck and corduroys. Without prompting, Wendy searched the long, narrow drawer by the range for a wooden spoon with which to disembowel the turkey of its stuffing. She set the spoon at the edge of the serving platter. Then, in the cupboard by the refrigerator, Wendy found three glasses, the ones with the decorative blueberries painted on them. The really good holiday finery would wait.

  In the den, Ben had vanished to fix himself another drink. Absences of this sort Elena knew intimately. Soon, according to habit, there would be the sound of ice hitting the bottom of a tumbler and the sudden swelling of show tunes from their new high-fidelity stereo system.

  Richard Kiley was going to dream that impossible dream again.

  Elena spooned the peas onto the plates Wendy provided and then went to help her daughter fold the napkins and arrange the cutlery, turning a knife here so that the sharp side faced in, adjusting the glasses so that each was at the right-hand corner of the plastic place mats. The dog trotted in from the den, decelerating as he rounded the sink, spinning in circles before settling under the center of the table. And behind him came his master, whose beverage—its tinkling melody—announced his entrance.

  They each stood around the remains of the turkey, spooning carbohydrates onto their plates beside the peas. The order of it was impeccable. First Wendy, then Benjamin, then Elena carried her plate to the table and returned to the refrigerator in search of a beverage. After a long, fruitless investigation, Wendy settled on pasteurized, homogenized, vitamin D–enriched milk. As Wendy held out the milk carton for her father, who accepted it and poured himself a glass—it would sit next to the scotch-on-the-rocks—Elena concluded that her daughter and husband each looked into the refrigerator in the same way. Hopefully. While she and Paul recognized what limited offerings were concealed there.

  The sleet or slush or whatever it was against the kitchen windows. Elena couldn’t see beyond the driveway, where a light on the house threw a dim glow against the sheets of precipitation. No one in New Canaan would really want to stay home on a Friday night in heavy snow. No one would want to stay home with their children. The party would go on.

  And the turkey was no longer moist. This conclusion was unavoidable. Above all, she and Benjamin agreed on the necessity of moist turkey. This was an area where progress had certainly delivered miracles. And yet this moist quality seemed to last through the first serving only. One had to guard against dryness in leftovers. One had to reheat gravy. And Elena had failed here. She knew that if she ever suffered a real and debilitating mental illness, its onset would not be the result of a failed marriage or because of twentieth-century spiritual impoverishment; it would be caused instead by these details, by a pen mark on the designer pantsuit she’d bought for the holidays, by the slight warp in her Paul Simon album, or by the acrid taste of old ice cubes. These small things led to a bottomless pit of loneliness beside which even Cambodia paled.

  She rose again from the table and flung her napkin on the chair. The dog struggled up immediately after her, betting on plate-clearing. She patted the flat spot on his head, where he might have had a brain, before locating the leftover cranberry sauce in the Frigidaire. Wendy and Benjamin greeted the bowl of jelly with smiles, with mouths full.

  The dog trotted back to his spot.

  Elena circulated the jelly, but it was too late. Wendy was almost done with her turkey. Benjamin was concentrating mostly on his scotch. So there it was. There were automatic appliances of every kind now—washers and dryers, dishwashers and ice-makers, juicers and electric grills. There were moon shots. But still there was the conundrum of day-old turkey.

  Twenty minutes now without a syllable of conversation. It stunned Elena as she was corralling a half-dozen peas against a mound of stuffing. She had felt the obligation to create conversation for years, perhaps for a lifetime. That is, she had felt the obligation when she had not felt the contrary one, to refuse all conversation. It was her duty to take charge. Words that soothed and were inoffensive. Words that bore up wounded hearts. Maternal language. But she had seen how these bons mots were ineffective. She had seen Benjamin, as she had seen the men in her family, bristle at some mild word of kindness.

  On the paddle-tennis court, recently:

  —Benjamin, she said to a doubles partner, has a serve like a howitzer.

  At once, he called to her across the court.

  —Don’t be a dip shit, baby doll.

  His face like a red balloon, swollen.

  To start a conversation was to be the messenger of ill. She would no longer feel obliged. She thought about her daughter in the Williamses’ basement. She imagined Wendy with a skirt hiked up, imagined the precise curve of her buttocks, the tuft of blond pubic hair. Wendy’s calves already had a perfect feminine knot, as though she had been wearing high heels for years, and it was clear from the early protrusion of her breasts that she wouldn’t have the small, insignificant bosom that her mother needlessly restrained with under-wire support.

  Wendy didn’t seem ashamed in the aftermath of this contretemps. She seemed, on the contrary, emboldened by being caught. In secret, Elena admired her daughter’s pluck. Lost in affection, she missed the opportunity to chastise Wendy—who hadn’t asked to be excused. Her daughter was poised at the fridge again, having left her plate and glass in the sink. Again the fridge disappointed Wendy. She turned instead to the cupboard where the cookies and candy were stacked haphazardly. She selected a box of Hot Tamales, a candy that was left over from her Halloween basket. Maybe her final Halloween basket—she was old now for that kind of dressing up. Then Elena’s daughter slunk out of the room. Dulcinea! Dulcinea! was replaced in the library by the distant sound of the television, leaden and excruciating. That it was already time for A Charlie Brown Christmas seemed intolerable to Elena.

  She and her husband rose together from the table. The dog trotted after them to the sink.

  —What’s for dessert? Benjamin said.

  —See for yourself.

  —No advice from the experts, huh?

  —Don’t expect me to amuse you tonight, Ben.

  He idled in the center of the room.

  —Sounds like we’re in for a good time.

  His plate slipped out of his h
ands and into the trash. He fished it out, set it on the counter.

  —Party time, he said. Kinda wow—

  —Don’t start, Elena said.

  —You think I—

  —I have no idea—

  She set her plate in the sink a little gingerly. It had a dramatic crash to it she hadn’t intended. The Peanuts theme song—that happy and melancholy piece of jazz—filled the next room.

  —What’s on your mind? he said. Don’t—

  —It wouldn’t make it a pleasant evening, she said, if that’s what you’re after. I don’t want to talk about it.

  Furiously, Benjamin reached into the cupboard, into Wendy’s cache of Halloween treasure and filched an Almond Joy bar.

  —Well, let’s not talk then.

  —Surprise, Elena mumbled. And then:—Stupid mustache cup.

  Wearily, he said:

  —What do you mean?

  —Don’t be dim.

  —I don’t know what you’re taking about.

  —I’m not surprised, Elena said.

  Hood pointed half an Almond Joy bar at her.

  —Listen, honey, if you’re gonna pull that passive aggressive stuff on me again …

  —Your unfaithfulness, she said. That’s what I’m trying to talk about. Your unfaithfulness, your betrayal. Your dalliance. Okay? And you won’t do me the dignity of being up-front about it.

  Hood went pale. He was frosty and blank and empty.

  —Am I unfaithful? Is that what you’re trying to say? Is that what you’re trying to accuse me of?

  The conversation got quieter and quieter.

  —It’s a starting place.

  —Well, what kind of faithfulness are you after? he said.

  —If you’re going to insult me with—

  —What else could I be? Hood rushed on. What else could I be besides unfaithful? We’re not living in the real world, honey. You’re living out of some fantasyland from the past. You’re living out some advice from the fancy psychotherapists. There are some hard facts here.

  A room full of silences.

  —Look around you, anyway. It’s the law of the land. People are unfaithful. The government is unfaithful. The world is. Look at those two guys on the Yankees, for God’s sake. And you saw that movie. Nothing is the way we think. Everything is diluted. And I’m not having any fun at it, I can tell you that. Look, it’s all bruises, baby doll. And I’m not … I can’t wait for us to heal up forever, you know—