Black Ice by Lorene Cary

Author:Lorene Cary [Cary, Lorene]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-77847-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-12-29T05:00:00+00:00

Everyone was cleaning, girls filling and then overfilling trash cans with accumulated exam-week waste—papers, notebooks, hated texts, tissues, empty tampon and cookie boxes. I went to the refrigerator at the end of my short corridor to clear out my edibles: a dried-out piece of cheese that I refused to eat after some girl had had the temerity to nibble it, and the cold, miniature cans of pear nectar that my grandmother sent. (Pear nectar was never pilfered.)

I felt a resentful regret as I passed a pair of skis leaning against the wall between the refrigerator and Sara’s room. I had lacked the money and the gumption to learn to ski that winter. Here I was in New Hampshire, and not learning to ski. I might never have another chance. I looked into Sara’s room and envied her her long, slim legs and feet, their strength and skill.

I wished that I could be satisfied with what everyone said was a good, solid start at a St. Paul’s career, but I couldn’t. I wanted skills it took years to learn, experiences I would never have. I wanted to have what they had, just in case I needed it, like big vocabulary words.

I seem to remember the cold, solid knowledge that caught me occasionally during adolescence that the seasons came and went according to the rhythm of nature. What I missed I would never chance on again; some things were final; some experiences could not be shared. I thought of a girl back home who had become pregnant the year before and had had an abortion. We corresponded, and I saw her when we were able, but it was hard to talk sometimes.

“Oh, Libby, are you cleaning out the fridge?” Sara asked me. “It’s so gross when people forget to do that.”

I thought of the janitor of our building, cleaning up our messes. “If you dirty it up,” my mother said, “best you clean it yourself. Nobody in this world was put here to wipe anybody else’s behind.”

That is how I remember that night. I felt trapped, driven outside. I was certain that I could get free of the noise in my head if only I could get outside where the cold black sky shimmered with familiar constellations.

But how certain can I be that on that particular night many years ago Sara actually did park her skis against the wall by the fridge? How certain that it was on that night and not one of a hundred other clear, cold New Hampshire nights that I went out to sit on the ice by myself? It was surely after my failed attempt to find relaxation in a pipe or to fit in with kids who played munchkins in the snow. I know that, because when I sat on the Lower School Pond, I thought of them—and of my shame at crashing through the iced-over creek bed, clumsy as a white man on an Indian trail. I know that it was before we went home, because when we returned in March the pond was thawing, and the ice was breaking up.

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