Parachutes and Kisses by Erica Jong

Author:Erica Jong
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US

10

Adrift

Where are the snows of yester-year?

—FRANÇOIS VILLON “Ballad of Old-Time Ladies”

The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree Has given my heart A change of mood And saved some part Of a day I had rued.

—ROBERT FROST “Dust of Snow”

BY Christmas, they had already had three major blizzards that year. Pipes froze. The driveway iced over. Many mornings, Isadora would look out at the deck and find the hot-tub lid piled high with snow and the hemlock branches dangling icicles. Great gobs of snow slid off the skylights. The furnace conked out and the telephones went on the blink with great regularity.

It was a tribute to the depths of connection between Isadora and Kevin that they kept on seeing each other through this siege. Sometimes he would come up on a Friday night despite the fact that the trains were late or canceled, and Isadora had to call the local driver service to get a jeep to fetch him at the train because she could not get up her driveway.

Her driveway was, anyway, a nightmare. It seemed to have a life (and a Geist) of its own. It was possessed. It had, after all, taken Chekarf’s life. And it seemed to want more blood. Whenever Nurse Librium drove Mandy to school, Isadora worried that the driveway, not being content with Chekarf as a sacrifice, would try to take Mandy, too. She had suffered so many losses in the last year—Papa, Chekarf, Josh—that she could not believe there were not more to come. If she had been a horror novelist, she would have written a novel about her driveway and how it got to be so bloodthirsty. Was it something in the asphalt perhaps, some dark ingredient—like the bones of an unavenged murdered innocent? Was it the karmic legacy of the builder, who had had the poor judgment to perch this house on a ledge of rock overlooking a beautiful river valley, but then had not even bothered to face the upper-story windows onto the view? Only the lower floors faced the view, and Isadora was always dreaming of building picture windows in the playroom and transforming it into her bedroom.

The builder—a spacy young fellow who had become a friend of Isadora‘s—had built the driveway with maximum perversity. It went down from Serpentine Hill Road at a sixty-degree angle, took a hairpin turn (which was badly drained and therefore always iced over), and then went up a little rise, right after whatever car you were driving had already gone into a skid. It was the property’s most eccentric and impossible feature. The Mercedes—with its wide wheelbase and skiddy rear wheels—often could not make it up the driveway in winter. And now that Josh had gone off and taken both the Land Cruiser and the Datsun, Isadora had to buy a new front-wheel-drive car for the nanny, simply to get Amanda back and forth to nursery school. But sometimes the snow was so deep and the plow so late in coming that even the new Saab could not get up the road.

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