Thin Ice (7 page)

K
rishna picked me up.  She had her dad’s car.  We picked up Chrystal, bought a six-pack at Pat’s Tap, and planned to drive to Ziggy’s.

“That’s where Gay is
.  Wait,” Krishna said, “let’s surprise her.  You wait here at Pat’s on the steps and we’ll trick her.  We’re tell her we’re looking for dope, and then we’ll drive past Pat’s Tap and say, ‘Oh look, there’s Jane!  Maybe she has dope.’ Then you get in the car.”

We giggled at this
.

I waited in the sun
. 

I loved
being drunk in the middle of the afternoon when it was sunny.  There was something magical about it.  It was normal to be completely inebriated in the evening, but there was something special about it in the middle of the day.  The warmth of the sun on your skin, the blueness of the sky, the bright-green leaves on the trees.

I loved the warm stones against my skin
.  I wore short shorts and a tank top.  I lit a cigarette, and in the time it took to finish it, they drove up.

I
sat in the car.  Gay was in the backseat, trying to light a cigarette.  I climbed in and slammed the door.  Gay continued trying to light her cig, but kept staring at me with wide eyes. 

“You need me to help you light that?”
I grabbed her lighter and lit her cig.

Then she started laughing that hyena laugh of hers
, and saying, “Oh my God, you guys tripped me up bad.  You tricked me good.” She was nodding and slapping her knee.  “I had no idea you were back in town.  They said, ‘We’re going to look for some pot,’ and I was like, ‘Whatever,’ and then suddenly Krishna said, ‘There’s Jane.  Let’s see if she’s got any dope.’”

We couldn’t have played this trick if we’d been in my car
.  Good thing Krishna had turned sixteen.

“We are going out to
County Park,” Krishna said.  “We have to get more beer.  It’s Ziggy’s birthday.  They’re already there.”

By the time we
arrived there, I was so drunk that I wasn’t sure what was happening.  There was the lake, and the blue of the sky.  I don’t remember seeing Ziggy at all.  I don’t remember seeing anyone but Krishna and Gay, and always laughing hysterically.  We sat on the stone benches under a picnic table. 

They told me later how funny I was
.  They told me things I’d said and done.  When we had gone back to my house, my mom had offered us ham.  For some reason, according to them, this had struck me so funny that I’d kept falling off my chair laughing.  When she’d served the ham on the dining-room table, I’d again fallen out of my chair laughing.  They told me she’d said, “What is so funny?” which had only made me laugh harder.  After dinner, she’d cleared the table, replaced the mess with a tidy tablecloth with lace frills, and set a bowl of peaches in the middle.  They told me I’d said, “What a lovely bowl of peaches,” and then proceeded to take a bite out of each peach in the bowl, completely ruining the display.

My mom, they said,
had begun yelling at me, but this had only made me laugh harder.

They
stood up to leave.

“I have to return my car,”
Krishna said.

“Why?” I asked.

“My dad wants it back.”

“You listen to your dad?” I said.

“We have to leave,” they said, and moved away.

“Wait, hang on, I’ll get my car,” I said.

“You’re not driving in that condition,” my mom said.  I grabbed the keys off the counter and headed out to the driveway after them.

“I’ll follow you
!” I shouted, and climbed into my car before Mom could stop me.  I squealed my tires out the driveway.

It wasn’t technically my car
.  It was technically her car, but this thought just made me laugh more.

There were no
drunk-driving laws.  There was this new thing called MADD, which stood for Mothers Against Drunk Driving, but the thought of that simply cracked me up even more.  I drove 90 mph to Krishna’s house, swerving by the lake and nearly tipping over.  How funny was that?

I arrived at
Krishna’s and stumbled up the walk.

“Hello Jane, welcome back
.  How was California?” said Krishna’s mom. 

How funny was that?

Krishna
said, “We’re going to Ziggy’s going-away party.”

“Where is he going?”

“To Yale.”

“Oh,” I said
.  “I already knew that.  I must have forgotten.  Where is it?”

“
New Haven, stupid.”

“No, I mean the party.”

“Oh.  Clyde’s.”

“
Not Clyde’s!” I exclaimed. “I can’t stand him.  He fawns over me.”

“I don’t like him either
.  But that’s where the party is.”

We rarely ever saw
Clyde.  He was some friend of Ziggy’s.  I often heard the two of them arguing about the Doors.

“I don’t like any band that use
s only major chords,” I once heard Ziggy say.  Clyde argued that they didn’t actually use only major chords, but that they did use them more than most bands, but that was what made them sound a little spooky.  Ziggy argued that they did use only major chords.  I knew that couldn’t be true, but didn’t say anything.  I wasn’t about to intercede on behalf of Clyde.

But Ziggy was probably right, because he was always right about everything.

That’s probably why he was accepted into Yale and Clyde wasn’t.  I remember hearing Clyde say, “I got the same GPA; I don’t understand it.  Why did he get in and I didn’t?”

I knew why
.  Ziggy’s family had been going to Yale for generations.  At least, that’s what I’d heard.

I kept
becoming lost on the way to his house.  Krishna gave bad directions.  Then we remembered we were supposed to pick up Gay, so we had to drive out of town and back.  By the time we arrived there, I was completely stoned, and it was moving towards evening, which made the place harder to find.  We stumbled in the doors giggling at around 8:00, when the party was well underway.  Ziggy looked up from where he was sitting, in front of the stereo, changing a record, and said, “About time you guys got here.  I hope you have booze.”

“Yes
.” Krishna grinned, handing him a bottle of wine. “We brought this as your going-away gift.”

Clyde
’s house had wooden floors.  That’s what I remember most about the night we said good-bye to Ziggy.

We sat in a circle on the wooden floor in the dark, with a candle in the middle
.  I’m pretty sure Paul wasn’t there, but I was too drunk to notice whether he was someplace or wasn’t someplace.  I didn’t think about it.

W
e were playing a drinking game.  It was called Wink.  You had to wink at someone and then you had to take a drink or something like that. 

The candle in the center flickered, casting shadows
.  Everyone glanced from one to another.  If you saw someone wink, you had to take a drink, or you were dead, one or the other.  Or maybe both.  But you had to try to wink at them before they could wink at you.  Looking at them was dangerous, lest you see them wink.

“Wait a minute,” I said
.  “What if someone winks at you and you decide to lie about it, and deny that you saw them wink?”

“Then unless you have a witness, you can get away with it,” Ziggy said, and then he winked at me
.  He couldn’t wink.  He was unable to close one eyelid at a time, and he had a funny way of moving, as if the whole procedure required the entire head to participate.  He couldn’t wink.

“Did you
wink at me?”

“Yes,
you’re dead.  And I have witnesses.”

“
No I’m not, ’cause that wasn’t a wink.  I don’t know what that was.  That was a lopsided blink. Leaning your head to one side doesn’t make it a wink.”

We started school soon after that.  The night before school started, I stood at the bottom of the stairs, shouting up at my mom.  I shouted, “I don’t have my school supplies!”

“What are you talking about?” my mom asked.

“My school supplies.  I need them.  I’m starting school tomorrow.  It’s the first day.  I don’t have any supplies.”

“What supplies?”

“I don’t know.  Notebooks?”

“There are notebooks around here
.  Go find some in the house,” she said, rubbing her eyes with sleepiness.  She wore the threadbare, blue nightgown I’d been seeing my whole life.

“
But it’s more than notebooks.  I’m not sure what I need, but I know I’m not prepared.”

M
y dad walked behind her toward the closet.  He wore his tiger-striped pajamas.  I remember him helping me with my math homework, wearing those, in the kitchen.  I always thought of that night when I saw those pajamas.  I hadn’t been able to understand the math, and he had grown angry and yelled, and the pajamas and the math and the yelling and the kitchen table swirled into one memory. 

Dad
grabbed a towel from the long, narrow cabinet and went into the bathroom behind my mother, who stood at the top of the red-carpeted stairs.  She clearly wanted to end the conversation and head to bed.

“I am not going to the
store now, obviously, Jane.  You’ll have to go to school tomorrow with what you have.”

“I won’t go to school then
!” I screamed in frustration. 

“I don’t care what you do
!” my mom shouted back.

A lump choked me
.  I flung whatever I was holding onto the carpet at the bottom of the stairs. 

The carpeting at the bottom of the stairs was red
.  The red carpet covered the hallway, and up the stairs, and through the tiny hallway at the top, but didn’t extend into the rooms on either side.  The living room to my right was gold carpeted, and the dining room to my left was blue.  I threw down the papers and the folders and the pens and pencils.  They splayed over all three colored carpets.

I don’t care what you do.

“You don’t care?” I shouted.  “You don’t care?  Maybe you’ll care about this!” I ran to the kitchen. 

The lights in the kitchen were off.
  I went to the stove, and lit the flame.  It flared high, its tip glowing blue, the rest of it sunset orange.  I grabbed vegetable oil and poured it all over a crocheted hot pad my great aunt had made, then tossed it in the flame.  The flame rose higher, blackening the air vent and cream-colored cabinets above the stove.  Those cabinets could have used a paint job anyway.

I headed back through the blue dining room
.  As I passed the red-carpeted stairs, I gave a smirk-laden warning. “By the way, the house is on fire.”

I
stomped to my nothing room and shut the door. 

The room was an add-on to the house
.  I had stood in the room when it had been a wooden structure with plastic wrapped around it to keep the cold out, sawdust on the floor, and one large standing light that shone too brightly.

I went into my
bathroom.  That was one of the main reasons I’d moved into the add-on room: to have my own bathroom.  I stood watching my insane face laughing in the gilded-framed mirror.  I couldn’t stop laughing. 

The laughter had no meaning
.  What I had done wasn’t funny.  When I really looked into those laughing eyes of mine, what I saw wasn’t humor.

I
t was fear.

I went back into my room
, under a standing light that still shone too brightly.  I could see my laughing, insane reflection in the darkness of the backyard behind my picture window.  I collapsed into the green folding chair, the one that Gay always passed out drunk on every time we crashed at my house instead of one of the others.  I could see why she passed out in it.  She probably fell over backwards like I was about to do.

B
efore long, two big policemen showed up in my room.  They wore blue uniforms and funny hats.  I thought about Officer Friendly as I looked at them, the laughter gone.

“Your parents said you lit the house on fire.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Why did you light the house on fire?”

“Because it seemed like a good idea.”

“Your parents said you were laughing and laughing about it.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“But you’re not laughing now.”

“No.”

“Why did you stop laughing
?”

“Because it’s not funny anymore.”

The two of them stood there, gazing at me.  I could see them watching me out of the corner of my eye, in my memory, and in the picture window.

Then they left and closed my bedroom door.

I overheard one of them say to my parents, who stood in robes between the red staircase and the gold living room, “She seems perfectly sane to me.”

“What a relief,” I heard my mother say.

My parents had put the fire out before it had done much damage.  I was surprised they had reacted at all.