The Ice Storm (5 page)

An example of their unsavory entrepreneurial activities: Mr. Williams had negotiated a deal with the folks at Topps Chewing Gum. What the deal was, nobody could ever explain to Wendy. She wasn't sure Sandy or Mike understood it either. Bazooka gum, among the principal product lines of Topps, was a factor in the deal. As a result, the Williamses ended up with several large crates of Bazooka. These crates were warehoused in their basement. Bazooka, which was like a gold standard at Saxe Junior High and at New Canaan High School, was thus available to Mike and Sandy in gross quantities for use at school. With it, Mike was able to produce an impeccable collection of the 1973 New York Mets baseball cards (which didn't help them win the World Series). With Bazooka Joe he had also procured fake vomit, a T-shirt that said
Enjoy Cocaine
in the same letters as the
Enjoy Coca-Cola
commercial, many types and varieties of firecrackers, such as M-80s and lady-fingers and bottle rockets, and a red Flexible Flyer sled. Sandy had turned his gum into currency, for a price slightly above retail, and filled a gigantic change bank with the money. He just liked to count the stuff.

How Mike bested Sandy in the battle for Wendy's body, a prize she was pretty willing to give up anyway, isn't much of a story. Sandy wouldn't look at her after the bathroom incident, and there was no one else suitable within a mile or so with whom to lock arms and make flimsy vows. She missed Sandy, but she was always missing something, and that little naked spot wasn't going to be filled by him or by anyone else on Valley Road. It was through the chewing gum, ultimately, that Mike had lured her, alone, into the basement with him. She had walked among those boxes as carefully as if this were some vast arms shipment. The sheer amount of gum dumbfounded her! What kid in their age and class would not kill for a twenty-four-count box of Bazooka rolls? Who cared about the endless fillings, about the horror of dentistry? Today a kid is here, tomorrow she is grown! Gum! Give us gum! We are hungry for gum!

And Mike was prepared to honor her wishes. He popped a piece in his mouth right then. She could smell it. She could taste the taste—amusement park and industrial cleaning agent. Together—shoulders brushed up against one another like they were already pledged to troth—they read the comic, laughing at how Sandy was like the guy, Mort, who always wore a turtleneck up over his mouth.

—Seriously, Mike said. Do you want gum?

—Of course, you jerk, she said. Why else would I be here?

—Nasty mouth, he said. Well, there's gonna be a little, you know, opportunity cost here. It's a cost-of-doing-business-type thing.

—Huh?

—You know, Charles. Pussy.

The word fell from his mouth like the name for a particularly dull frozen vegetable. Twat, pussy, cunt, muff, slit, pudenda. There were no good words for the anatomy of girls. Why were the words for beautiful things—orchids, gables, auroras—so beautiful? Would her pussy, if it were named after one of these, still sound so homely?

—You want to get into my pants, Mikey?

And this turned out to be the right way to approach the issue. At the invitation, he got all panicky. She could see him freezing up. She had been wearing shorts with little floral suspenders that day. Suspenders were in since
Godspell
. Some frilly, lacy shirt. A trainer bra. Mike had never bargained on cooperation. Boys thought of girls the way they thought of particularly good careers, things to work toward. Or as fine objects: they wanted to haggle and get a good price. Wendy thought she was the first fourteen-year-old in America to fully understand this point.

—What's my payment, Mikey? If you want what you want, you gotta put your cards out on the table.

The opportunity to fool with the boxes of gum afforded him the time he needed to think. The Williamses never understood
people
, really. That's what Wendy thought. They fooled around with enterprises. Her mother had told Wendy this. It was one of her mother's very firm points of view.

Mike brought two gross boxes from one of the packing crates and placed them at her feet, like he was one of the wise men in the school Christmas pageant.

—Not enough, she said.

—No way, Wendy. My dad'll see. You know? He's keeping an eye out—

—So he chews it too?

—It's not that, it's—

—Mikey, you're making me mad. Forget it. You're insulting me. I want the whole thing. I want a whole crate full.

He couldn't. He just couldn't. In Wendy's social studies class they were doing skits about
ethical dilemmas
in November, and this would have made a fine one. Wendy did hers on President Nixon's agonizing decision about whether or not to burn the tapes rather than turn them over to the special prosecutor. What Mike didn't realize was that Wendy would have done it for nothing.

Now, in November, it was wet and cold and he was late. He should have had time to stow his soccer clothes and make it to Silver Meadow. He should have had time to put everything else out of his mind except her, except the things about her—her hair in the wind, the way she hugged harder than anyone else, her devotion. In summer it was easy, and just a look at her body was enough to get him to put aside boyish things. The moment came, that first moment, gratis, at the country club.

They were behind the snack bar, about to go their separate ways, to their separate bathhouses. Such a small parting. But she felt as though she were losing an heirloom at that moment, as if the memory of her lost grandparents had vanished somehow, or a friend who died in childhood of leukemia had just been laid to earth, so she held him by his shoulder and with one hand tugged down the bottom of her American stars-and-stripes two-piece bathing suit and revealed the blond, almost hairless pubic bone underneath.

Because the town was as barren as a rock face. Because her family was chilly and sad. It had come over her that fast. That's why she did it. Or if love existed, it was buried so far down in work and politeness that its meager nectar could never be pumped to the surface. She had never seen her parents embrace. Her mother had actually once denied loving her father—she'd said she
liked him all right
. Her dad said these were subjects for encounter groups, for religious cults, and for the inmates over at Silver Meadow, but not for families. Wendy yearned for vulgarity, for all this sloppy stuff. She yearned for some impolite rustling or a torn piece of fabric; for some late-night moaning, for some Swedish Super-8 movies:
Biology Class
or
Madame Ovary
. For anything that didn't have the feelings bleached out of it. She would have made out with their retriever to learn a little bit about love. Please God, Wendy thought on the stately paths of Silver Meadow, not another winter night of New Canaan conversation …

So, back at the country club. Mike gazed at her vagina—its concealments and complexities—and froze. The sounds of the country club swept over them like an orchestral tuning. She could hear caddies suggesting a particular iron, kids arguing about who got to go off the high dive first, mothers hurrying children up to the snack bar. He smelled like coconut. She smelled like sweat and chlorine and generations of good breeding. The day smelled like hot pavement.

Then Mike Williams untied the knot in his maroon swimming trunks and revealed his own inheritance. He was no more like Sandy than she was. It was a big, sprawling thing, a garter snake coiled in his swimming trunks, or one of those Fourth of July snakes, the kind that unfurled themselves—from a little black chip—in a thick, stinky, sulfuric haze. A small down of auburn hairs adorned its base where the little fellow was now swelling forth as though she had used its secret name.

—This is it, Wendy, Mike said.

They embraced. And parted. Wendy laughed and laughed and laughed.

For a couple of weeks after that Mike was pretty shy. Well, she gave him the benefit of the doubt. Watergate was heating up. Saturday Night Massacre. Wendy had started watching Watergate more closely than even
Dark Shadows
or
The 4:30 Movie
. She liked to see Nixon sweating under the cameras; she liked the relentless glare of network news. But Mike came back eventually, like he was coming up Valley Road, now, on his Fuji bicycle.

Finally, she had led him from his chewing-gum counting house and down to the little graveyard on Silvermine Road, where lost souls from the nineteenth century slept fitfully—Sereno Ogden, Capt. Ebenezer Benedict, and S. Y. St. John—where none came to mourn, where kids practiced their French inhaling. When the dizziness from their own pack of Larks was too much, Wendy lay across his chest. And he held her there.

She could see his erection in the tan corduroys, straining like the kid in math who always had the answer. And they undressed there in the graveyard, their clothes piled neatly on some family mausoleum, and then they stopped just short, each with the other's smell on his or her hands, each like an overwound watch. They just stopped. Who knew why? So the graveyard, for Wendy and Mike, inaugurated the tradition of dry humping.

—Where have you been? she called across the gloomy landscaped expanses of Silver Meadow.

—Something with my mom, Mike said, hauling his bike alongside him. She was getting out of the house in a hurry and I was in the driveway trying to get the chain back on the bike, and then, because of the rain, I went back in the garage—

Mike pointed at a spot on her chest, right in the center of her poncho, and she looked down. He chucked her under the chin with his index finger. HA! HA! HA! HA! He always did that.

—Freezing my ass off out here, she said.

—Don't bum out. Charles.

The light was failing. The precipitation had turned to snow. Or something close to it, fierce nuggets of precipitation. Precipitation like an insult. But the anticipation of licentiousness thrilled Wendy, worked that tantric magic on her. Winter didn't trouble her. She could have waded miles in the slush and ice, like a superhero.

The basement of the Williams house was unused and lonely. She had seen, in the frugal architecture of local churches—Congregational and Episcopalian and Presbyterian; her mom could never make up her mind about denomination—those small altars where just prior to communion the minister arrayed himself in his professional garment, and where the sacred vessels moldered. Sacristy? This was how she thought of the Williamses' basement, as she straddled the seat of Mikey's bike (he pedaled standing up), and held fast onto his waist.

It was an uphill ride and they left her own house behind—on the far edge of Silver Meadow—that ramshackle place of dark brown, full of drafts and ancient hinges, the former home of Mark Staples, Republican assemblyman and Episcopal minister of New Canaan from 1871 to 1879.

And then up the hill, up the hill. Mike downshifted angrily, as though the incline were a challenge to his burgeoning manhood.

The Williamses' place was white and squarish with columns in front. An American flag usually hung limply there, but not this afternoon. Mourning doves wailed in the backyard. The steep backyard that tumbled headlong down into the creek there. (Down where Wendy lived the creek ran right under the living room patio.) There was always wildlife strutting around Mikey's backyard—raccoons, muskrats, and rabbits. The wildlife of the suburbs. It was practically like
Mutual of Goddam Omaha
back there. The Silvermine River teemed with inflatable canoes.

Mike dumped his bike on the grass by the garage door, never mind the rain. They snuck in through the porch, downstairs.

In the ritual of their congress, Wendy insisted on silence. No getting-to-know-you chatter. Some conversation was inevitable, the table-setting, the hors d'oeuvres, but a silence was more dignified. Around them, the dusty packing crates full of gum were like the faceless sentries that protected some imperial decay, like the Easter Island statues in this book the boys at school had lately been passing around,
Chariots of the Gods
. The Bermuda Triangle. The basement was a neglected precinct of the Williamses' place. The Ping-Pong table sagged in the middle of the room, like a rotting sea vessel. The power tools hanging on the wall were instruments of torture. The dart board had a woman's face, torn from a magazine, stuck upon it.

The other book everybody read at school was
Go Ask Alice
.

Were Wendy to peel off the layers, the painter's pants, the turtleneck, the toe socks, she would also have to shed the church-going, cheerleading Ivory Soap girl. She would have to reveal to Mike the depths of her complicated feelings. But this was not her gig. This was New Canaan, after all. Her idea, instead, was about putting on more roles, more deceits. On the platform at the end of the room, on the beanbag chair that faced the television set, they positioned themselves.

And Wendy began reluctantly to confide in him her instructions. They played the roles, that afternoon, of corporate managerial type and assistant. Mike was coming to her house one afternoon, one weekend afternoon, to deal with a crisis—yeah, that was it—a crisis concerning some stocks, and he needed her help. He needed her.

—And I'm just lying here, Wendy said. I'm just lying here and something's really wrong. I'm crying, sobbing maybe, because I'm alone, because my man has gone or something, and you come in and try to comfort me.

—But—

—I'm in the middle of some really awful heartbreak. On his knees, with the clumsiness of a boy who would never appear on stage in his entire life, he mimed the adjustment of his necktie. He set down his attaché case by the magazine rack. Wendy put a finger to her lips and the performance began in earnest. In the half-light.

A long afternoon was over at the office, Wendy thought. The daily political struggle was over. He brushed back her hair. Who was he and why did he understand so well how to console a woman? The loss of her husband, the estrangement of her children—she had been judged unfit—her inability to work. She had only the properties and income that the divorce settlement deeded her. Not enough to live in the style she was accustomed to.