WINTER LIFE by Bonnie Jo Campbell
Trisha and Harold were more-or-less happily married four years, despite Trisha’s late night drinking and her bouts of weeping, which had gotten more frequent since the war in Iraq, where her brother was now in his third tour of duty. One late evening when it was too cold to snow, when Harold was already stretched out in bed reading, Trisha leaned against the bedroom doorframe to keep her balance and said, “I think I’ll call Stuart.” Usually Harold would have said, “That sounds like a bad idea, Trish,” but this evening he had been quieter than usual and now he just shook his head and went back to reading. Trisha felt the floor creak beneath her all along the hallway and into the kitchen. The wood of these old floors expanded in summer, shrank in winter.
Trisha had dated Harold’s best friend Stuart for two years before she’d made the switch over to Harold. She and Harold had married abruptly, perhaps as a way of justifying their betrayal. Though Stuart had a wild temper and though he could be an asshole–he still accused Trisha of being a lesbian because she had several times danced with a girlfriend at a bar–and though he was now married to an off-again-on-again meth addict, Trisha still longed for the intense intimacy she once shared with Stuart, who was, after all, her first love.
Trisha’s heart sparked at the sound of Stuart’s harsh hello?, and she ended up having a nice talk with him. He asked about her brother in Iraq and then told her that he’d caught his wife shooting up under the basement stairs the other day. He said that his sister Pauline, “the sullen bitch,” had just dumped her fiancé for no apparent reason. Stuart said he felt for the poor guy and was going to try to get him laid. By the time Trisha put down the phone, the details about Stuart’s wife and sister were hazy. Trisha hated the wife and had never felt at ease with the little sister Pauline, whose hands and feet were as big as a man’s. She didn’t like the gloomy way Pauline looked at Harold whenever they ran into her at the Farm ’n’ Garden, as though she was always about to ask Harold a time-consuming favor.
When the phone rang a few minutes later, it was Stuart’s wife, who screamed through the wires, “Don’t call here any more, you bitch!” She had apparently star-sixty-nined Trisha, or seen her on the caller I.D. “Don’t you ever call my husband again!”
“Go to hell, crack whore,” Trisha said and hung up. She looked out her kitchen window across the unbroken snow cover, lit by the security flood light. She imagined her brother standing alone in the windswept desert with sand in his socks, and she began to cry.
“Why don’t you turn down the thermostat and come to bed,” Harold said when Trisha stood leaning against the bedroom doorway again, with her lower lip stuck out, arms crossed, shoulders hunched. He folded his book over his chest and patted her side of the bed. “It’s never peaceful when you two talk.”
“Stuart’s not the problem. Stuart was fine. It’s his wife and his stupid sister that are the problem.” Trisha tried to stand up straight but wavered and had to steady herself against both sides of the doorway. “He caught his wife shooting up again.”
“And what’s the problem with Pauline?” Harold sat up against the headboard and studied his wife’s body. Her smallness surprised him in that moment, the thin bluish wrist, the tiny hand, tiny ring finger wearing the gold wedding band, the feet in pink doll slippers.
“She dumped her fiancé. Listen, Stuart’s wife doesn’t have to be such a bitch to me,” Trisha said. “She had no right to call up and attack me that way. I can’t go to sleep now.”
And Trisha knew perfectly well the woman was a meth addict, not a crack whore–it bothered her that she’d gotten that insult wrong in the heat of the moment.
Harold admired that his wife never wore make-up, but he was finding it hard just now to look at those naked, bloodshot eyes. Be-fore he’d married her, he’d managed to forget for long stretches of time that the world was a place of bone-aching loneliness. He adjusted his glasses and continued reading about organic heavy-mulch gardening. The photos and instructions assured him that spring would come, that he would prepare the soil, that the sun would nourish what he planted. He felt for his wife, even understood that she needed to talk to Stuart, but he knew the passionate knot of that old affair was too complicated to untangle even in broad daylight, stone cold sober. Even after all these years, he still felt bad about his and Trish’s abrupt switching of loyalties. Harold and Stuart had always known each other, and Harold had lived with Stuart’s family in their farmhouse during high school, before his parents got divorced; Stuart’s mother MaryBeth had helped him plant his first garden plot next to her own big garden.
After another vodka martini, after Harold had switched off his reading light, Trisha called Stuart’s mother, MaryBeth, with whom she had stayed in touch even after breaking up with Stuart, and at the sound of MaryBeth’s voice, she began to cry again. “How could that woman talk to me that way?” Trisha wailed. “She doesn’t even know me.” Trisha had always taken comfort in MaryBeth’s once saying that she, Trisha, was her favorite of all the women Stuart had ever dated.
The next day at the farm, when MaryBeth talked to her daughter Pauline in the driveway, she slipped off her gloves and warmed her hands on the fresh eggs in her coat pockets and said, “You know, Trisha called me last night, at about midnight. She was all weepy, poor soul.”
“Geez, Mom, why’s she calling you?” In all the years Pauline had known Trisha, she’d never once seen her on an even keel. Always, Trisha was furious or on the verge of crying or ecstatically happy.
“I’ve always liked Trisha,” MaryBeth said. “Her brother’s in Iraq, you know. I tried to comfort her, but then I got to remembering one night back when she was living here with your brother, in his room, after her ma kicked her out. I woke up to them fighting at four-thirty in the morning, screaming at each other, calling each other bitch and bastard and lesbian. Something hit my bedroom door, and I got up and found a snowmobile boot. I didn’t even want to be in my own house with that kind of racket, so I got dressed and went to the Halfway House and got some coffee and an omelet. Too bad they closed that truck stop down. It used to be open all night.”
“Denny’s is open all night,” Pauline said, but there was no stopping her mother once she got started telling one of her pointless stories.
“I met a nice fellow there that night,” MaryBeth said, “an electrician, a real capable guy. He ended up fixing the trouble I’d been having with my electric ever since your brother Stuart jammed a penny into the fuse box so his space heater wouldn’t blow fuses. You remember that melted penny?”
“I guess I’d better go to work,” Pauline said, but she didn’t get in her truck, didn’t head out to the Farm ‘n’ Garden store where she would wrestle bags of corn and lay mash and rolls of barbed wire into the backs of trucks for customers. She kicked her insulated work boot at some ice ridges in the driveway. She had always been in love with Harold, though nobody had ever suspected, certainly not her mother, who would have blabbed. A week ago, during a late afternoon blizzard that darkened the sky, Pauline had seen Harold puzzling over snow melt products at the Farm ‘n’ Garden–he was the only customer in the store, though it was still twenty minutes before closing. He seemed in no hurry, so she watched him from the end of an aisle, crossed her arms and leaned into the wide flat shovels hanging there. He read a fold-out label with considerable intensity, adjusting his wire-frame glasses twice, then studied the descriptions of several more products before lugging a box of environmentally-friendly pellets off the shelf. He paused to readjust a bottle he’d knocked out of place. She only stepped up to him when he was about to walk out of the aisle. He had greeted her warmly, squeezed her hand with his free hand, looked at her as though she were a plant about whose growth he might be at least curious.
They chatted about the snow storm, about MaryBeth’s chickens, about Trisha’s brother in Iraq. “I’m looking forward to trying some new things this year,” Harold said. “I’ll be doing lettuce and spinach in a cold frame for the first time.” Pauline felt an ache in her own heart at the way Harold longed for the growing season. It would be followed, as always, by the season of fruiting and the season of dying.
When Pauline had met her fiancé Nick later that night outside the bar, he seemed small and foolish with his pink ears–he wouldn’t wear a hat because he didn’t like the way it flattened his hair. She was surprised Nick even heard her breaking up with him; their voices seemed muffled by the dense white breath hanging between them, but really it was the loud live music coming from inside. He had gone on in. She had gone back to her little truck with the busted heater and driven home with her shoulders hunched against the bitter night’s cold.
Pauline took a deep breath and exhaled. Out here on the farm, a person’s breath blew away without stagnating, and this morning she was wearing her arctic weight Carhartt, instead of that flimsy leather thing she’d worn to the bar because Nick had given it to her. She had intended to break up with him, but she didn’t regret it.
Pauline said, “I suppose that big mouth Stuart told you I broke up with Nick.”
MaryBeth said, “I like Nick.”
“You like everybody,” Pauline said.
She felt her mother’s gaze on her as she kicked at a big chunk of ice that had built up behind her truck’s back wheel. While she’d been listening to Harold talk about his garden at the store, she’d remembered a time a decade ago when Harold had helped her remove her ice skates. She was about thirteen so he must have been sixteen, and they were alone in the farmhouse mud room, the windows of which were etched with frost blossoms, notched ice curves as intricate as Japanese landscapes. Their breath mingled, promised to fill the whole cold room. Harold had been wearing an oil-stained Carhartt coverall that belonged to his dad. She’d sat on the quarry tile floor in her snowsuit, with one leg in the air, one foot in Harold’s big gloved hands. The first skate came off easily, but the other was stuck. Harold removed his gloves, worked his frozen fingers under her snow-sodded laces. She felt the cold tiles under her butt. Then with a single tug, the skate came, and her sock slipped off too, exposing her bare foot to the cold air.
And that memory, more than the promise of spring, was why last week in the Farm ’n’ Garden, as the snow storm blotted out the sun, she had put her hand on the collar of Harold’s parka and pulled his face toward hers. That bare foot was why, beneath the stark fluorescent lights in that aisle full of salt and shovels, she raised up on the toes of her boots and kissed Harold’s mouth, the way she’d wanted to in that mud room, the way she’d always wanted to. He received her kiss quietly and without resistance, straightened up only when she released his collar. He did not glance around afterward, to see if they’d been observed. He squeezed her hand one more time and swallowed; he said, plainly, “I’d better go.” She hugged herself as she watched him proceed through the check out lane, producing exact change without looking back. She watched him swap a few weather-wise words with the manager who stood near the door. She watched him zip up his parka, adjust his wool cap, pull up his hood and tighten the strings, put on his big gloves, and head out into the blizzard.
Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of the novel Q Road (Scribner, 2002) and the story collection Women & Other Animals (1998). This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.