The Ice Storm (27 page)

Wait a second. Guest room? Wendy opened her eyes again. She could see her breath, it hovered before her. Sandy's slow respiration, too, like winter exhaust. She was in the Williamses' house? Still? She lurched from the bed. The floors were like ice. She danced. But soon her implacable mood returned. The electricity was off: no heat. She was already here. It was morning. She couldn't leave the room without running into Sandy's parents, without running into Mike, and that was just the way it would be now. Anyway, she loved Sandy. Anyway, she wanted to write Sandy's name on her breasts in indelible marker and to wear his band of gold. Anyway, she wanted to have his baby, to introduce him to marijuana, to watch him grow his first mustache.

She woke him roughly, just to see his expression. She called his name. His eyes opened immediately into regret and panic. Still sleepy, rubbing and scratching, he threw himself into a sitting position. His feet dangled over the edge of the bed.

—Oh, boy.… Oh. What are we gonna do?

Wendy laughed.

She was gathering up her clothes and, including the soiled garter belt from Mike's closet, carefully concealing it from Sandy, pushing it down into her ski pants, as she drew her turtleneck over her head again.

—We have to get back into my room, he said. You have to get out somehow.

—Huh?

—Don't talk so loud, Sandy whispered.

—I'm not, and besides, you're being a prude, you know? Who cares?

Sandy was out of the bed now, looking for evidence of something on the sheets, though there were no stains, looking anyway, the way an alcoholic will go through a metal detector convinced that he probably picked up a handgun somehow. Sandy looked for the abject beginnings of his own sexuality drip-drying there, or for the popped cherry which, according to school-yard sex studies, must have accompanied Wendy's night in his bed. Then he folded back the blankets, organized the bedspread. Everyone's bed-making style was their own, Wendy knew, as personal as their fingerprints or their heartbeat. Sandy wasn't doing anything more than forestalling his moment of coming clean. His neat but imperfect hospital corners would never fool his mom.

The way Wendy saw it, in this enclosed space, in this first flush of morning, they were secure—young lovers like avid readers gazing at the frontispiece of a dusty, inherited volume—refracting the movements of the outside world, of Canaan Parish and beyond. Eventually the door would swing wide. But for now they could just ride the love train.

So Wendy stopped, and removed her turtleneck again, cradling it in the pile of outer garments she held at her waist. She felt the frigid air on her nipples, those small, pink announcements of her sex, and she headed for the door.

—Clock's stopped, Sandy was saying behind her.

She was ravished, and what difference did it make? She was changed. What was the loudest noise a girl could make? What did buildings look like when they collapsed? Did the Pentagon actually levitate? She opened the door and loped without regret across the threshold of the guest room and into Sandy's room, where G. I. Joe's execution was still being played out. She began to lift her voice in song, to mumble lyrics from the Led Zeppelin songbook and other head music. Hawkwind. The ringwraiths rode in black!

Her mother's appearance at this point was swift, stunning, and unpredictable. Wendy cried out, in fact, at the sight of her mother, disarranged, wearing last night's clothes. Standing in the hall. It was as if her mother had learned the techniques of the sorceress—had learned actual invisibility—and through one of her spells had been observing her daughter's movements. Her Valkyrie mom. Later this moment replayed itself again and again in Wendy's consciousness, as if things would have turned out differently if she just hadn't gone out of that guest room.

—Put your shirt on right now, dammit, her mother said. Put your clothes on.

Beside them, between herself and her mom, Wendy could see the door to the guest room swing back—less than an inch. She could feel the worry that collected on the other side of it. In the meantime, though, she got hold of herself. She padded into Sandy's room. She was ready to deal with what was going down. She was sullen and erotically slothful. She scattered her turtleneck and her sweater and her poncho on Sandy's bed as though she were laying out a bounteous harvest. She took her time. She had goose bumps. She hugged herself with crossed arms. Her mother followed her into the bedroom.

—What are you doing here? Wendy asked.

—What business is it of yours? Elena Hood said. I might ask you the same question, young lady. It's my business to ask the questions. Did you spend the whole night here? And who gave you permission to do so? And where exactly did you spend the night? Where in this house?

Her mother's attention darted around the room as Wendy dressed, lit upon the doll swinging from the noose above Sandy's closet, didn't take it in. Then, peering out into the hall, Elena saw the guest room and understood. She called out Jim Williams's name, called down the hall,
Jim!
, and seized the doorknob—behind which Sandy stood in the dark, clutching his pajamas right at the crotch—ambushing the youngest Williams boy, with his dad not far behind her.

—What have you two been doing in here? Oh, dammit. Jim. Oh,
shoot
.

And so forth. With the imposing, yellow flashlight he bore—as long as his own forearm—Jim Williams and Wendy's mother examined the room, as though this entrapment didn't tell the story itself. They peeled back the bedding that Sandy had so laboriously organized; they turned over the pillows like archaeologists sifting through the dust. Finally they pulled the covers and the fitted sheet off the bed and searched the mattress itself, where there was an old dried menstrual stain. The pad on that bed—it was like some bloody shroud. Then, Elena Hood began to focus her attention upon the empty vodka bottle. Wendy and Sandy lingered guiltily behind their parents. The time for punishment was upon them.

—You drank this, bub? Williams said to his son, as Elena brandished the bottle. You realize the trouble this can get you into? Do you know anything about alcohol poisoning? Do you know what to do if someone suffers from alcohol poisoning? Have you ever heard of people choking on their own insides? From this stuff right here? Can you imagine what that's like, son?

Elena dragged Wendy out into the corridor to give her the same dressing-down. A long, familiar disquisition. She had watched so many people in her family destroyed by this and she couldn't watch it again. It was just too painful. Because of the way it ran in families, she or Paul could easily.… If you could have seen your grandmother.… Your uncle and his sadness and failures and all that suffering.… And don't forget about your dad … and mental illness, and death. Young lady. Death.

—Are you listening to me?

—All ears, Mom.

The next act of parental justice, the meting out of corporal punishment, arose swiftly from the lecturing, like a flash flood or act of God. Wendy had a sense that the scale of punishment that morning was a little out of whack, but she didn't know why at first. There was some adult thing going on that she didn't yet understand. Where was Sandy's mom, for example? Where was her dad? Then it began to register. She permitted herself to be led down the stairs as though to an execution. She permitted herself to be swallowed. Into the continuity of police logic. Pigs.

And there was a history to corporal punishment among the Hoods. There was a locus for punishment. It started with Paul. Paul was often a sickly child, out most of his kindergarten year at East School, with various infections and ailments—a case of strep throat and double ear infection, measles, whooping cough. Paul howled in the earliest morning hours, calling into question his own short life, in shrill, desperate shrieks that kept his parents awake, cries that in their desolation seemed to reach into his mother's heart and wrestle with her competence as a parent. This much was family lore. Elena had developed the habit, during this period, of taking Paul's temperature anally—because of his throat problems. It was one of those lovely, glass thermometers that was immersed in a glass case full of alcohol, the sort that seemed to foretell good by its very seriousness and simplicity. This practice persisted, until Paul came to see his mother's approach—the mysterious darkness into which she plunged her medical instrument—as the cure itself, bringing with it a legitimation of his distress.

This practice carried over to Wendy Hood, who also came to appreciate these ministrations given in silence, given with the dispassionate, preoccupied air of a jeweler or orthodontist. In silence, wreathed in isopropyl incense, the thermometer would tickle her hidden pink aperture, and she would be cured.

This, however, was not the only attention visited upon her ass in the Hood household. For the ass-spanking was a regular thing there. These occasions were grandly stylized, full of careful and loving ritual. Wendy's first spanking was the great organizing event of her early memory, though the crime that precipitated it was long forgotten. Her father carried her into her parents' bedroom. Her mother stood by, wordlessly. She refused to take down her pants. Her father humiliated her with language until she did so—called her a
slut
and a
hooker
and a
princess
. It wasn't difficult to degrade her with language—she was four. She took down her pants of her own free will. He then set her across his lap, and her mother presented the hairbrush—in the lore of the family, the bristle side was occasionally used—and, after pausing to contemplate the blank innocence of her hindquarters, her father drove the blunt side of the brush down upon her ass. What was her mother doing? Her nails?

Wendy recognized these diverse attentions on her ass, and they had become in some way indistinguishable, one from the other. They had become the Gestalt of her body. Which came first—the good-natured nursing of her mother, or the stern, but thoughtful, beatings of her father—was now unclear. It was all wound up together. What she ate, how she dressed, whether she ventured into the crass world of facial makeup, these seemed unimportant compared to how she attended to that site of medicinal and patriarchal attentions. She was mom and dad's little piece of ass.

So the trip down into the Williamses' living room had one purpose only. She could hear Sandy crying upstairs now and she could hear Mr. Williams's escalating monologue. These words had a mumbled, cabalistic sound. Hindu sutras. T.M. Elena Hood gripped her daughter's wrist tightly. The stark and pristine order of the Williamses' house surrounded them. In the living room, Elena commanded her to take down her pants. Wendy would have suffered this abuse—it seemed inevitable, almost natural—even though she was fourteen years old, because she had other things on her mind, because it had been a long twenty-four hours. But then she remembered that Mike's soiled garter belt was still tucked down there, tucked into her ski pants, and this was the one secret she wasn't going to part with. She refused.

—I said take down your pants, please, Elena Hood said.

—I'm too old. What are you going to do, Mom, spank me at the prom? Come find me in college so you can spank me?

—There's not going to be a negotiation here.

—Why, Mom, what are you going to do,
fuck me?

This ended the conversation. Her mother restrained Wendy in a choke hold. The room turned sideways, and suddenly Wendy was screaming, crying, and being dragged along the front hall. The details she could make out in the midst of this grim procession were strangely satisfying: the Oriental rug in the front hall bunched up under her heels; the morning sun reflected on the brass frame of a mirror in the front hall; her mother's face, distorted in the frame. Water was dripping somewhere. Her mother's strength was all out of proportion with her tiny, retiring body. In the bathroom—by the entrance to the basement—her mother held Wendy's mouth shut, clamped her palm there, and ran the tap with one hand. She immersed a handy little soap ball under the tap, until it had a good head of lather, and then she forced her daughter's mouth open—Wendy was begging for her not to do it, but these cries were wordless, strangled—and forced the wet, soapy ball into her mouth. Elena held Wendy's mouth shut again.

Wendy might have, ought to have, struck her mother back. She felt in her rage that she ought to have struck her mother, knocked out her straight, white, capped teeth, watched the blood flow across them (those faintly lipsticked teeth, even now faintly lipsticked), stepped over her mother's body stretched out on the floor—but she didn't. In an isolated chamber in her heart she complied with this torture. Maybe she had a feeling about what was coming next. She accepted it, accepted her humiliation, and the burning taste in her mouth and throat. Her limbs were weak. At last, her mother released her and she gagged and spit the little, blue soap on the crocheted rug on the floor. She wept.

—Let's have some breakfast, her mother said. Her voice was chilly and strange.

Wendy collapsed into a heap on the floor.

—Get up now, her mother said. Get up off the floor.

But Wendy wouldn't move.

—Pick that up and get up off the floor.

She lay there.

This time when her mother moved Wendy's body, when she lifted that frail doll's body from the bathroom floor, Wendy knew she was barely capable. Her mother's superhuman strength, the force field of care that surrounded her, these had all failed. Wendy would win in the end, just because she would live longer. This was how family was a bluff, a series of futile power grabs. Love was water torture, and sex was the physical abuse part of love, so sex was the torturous part of torture. Except that family was the worst torture of all.

They repaired to the kitchen, then, as though it was the last-chance kitchen, the last place where they might share a notion about women being together. It came over them all at once, how they could make breakfast for the men, the men upstairs. It was for the men, but it was for themselves, too. Wendy and her mom might, through the alchemy of breakfast, repair the situation before going home. Wendy moved in the kitchen like a wraith. Not talking to her mom. Eyes red. Swollen. Since the Williamses' stove was gas, Elena Hood was able to put on the kettle. She searched around the kitchen for a drip coffeemaker. She motioned wordlessly for Wendy to set the breakfast table. They rummaged through Janey Williams's drawers. Then, in the next room, the den: Wendy mushed up the old issues of the
Stamford Advocate
and the
New York Times
and made a small pyramid of kindling on the grate over these rumpled sheets. The sounds of her mother's modest domestic activities comforted her. She reached for the Ohio Blue Tip matches (strikes on any surface). She struck a match on her zipper, as Mike had once taught her to do.