A Slow Thaw

A Slow Thaw Linda Godfrey Here is the story I tell myself. I live in a nice house in a nice town with a nice husband and two nice kids. True, it is winter, the time for stories and high-banked fires, but when I tell you the real story, the one that lives outside my head when I'm not looking, you'll know why I'm a story teller, a liar speaking truths. Pay attention. Here goes. The sky hangs low, dull as oxidized silver. Another winter in upstate New York thirty miles from the Canadian border: sub-zero nights, snow banks high as giraffes, cars docked in driveways, their die-hard batteries electrical flatlines. At least a dozen people will kill themselves: cabin fever, full-spectrum light deprivation pulling the trigger or tying the noose. It is February. What would you like for your birthday, my husband asks. How about a divorce, I say. He laughs, pops open his eighth can of Bud, turns up the volume on a Knicks game. Dribble. Dribble. Pivot. Dunk. My nice house swells with the stomp, clap, hurrah of a basketball-frenzied crowd. I look at my watch. 2:00 p.m. Four more hours until he passes out on the couch. Here is the story I tell myself. I live in a nice house in a nice town with an alcoholic husband and two nice kids. Spring will never come. Not this year, so I grow it inside me, feeding myself stories about morning glories, rainbows, hummingbirds and a little [End Page 116] old lady who lives in a big shoe, eats strawberry-rhubarb pie and dates a crooked man who has walked a crooked mile and is now tired enough to finally settle down and make a commitment. When he moves in, her big, high-buttoned house suddenly seems a tight fit. Bunions begin to sprout. She sells, makes a killing in real estate and avoids paying capital gains tax by buying a sprawling crooked house where she and her crooked man live together with a little crooked mouse. Jack and Max are six and seven. They look like their father, heavy-lidded and uninspired, so I try to wrap them in stories, my thermal underwear of words to warm their genetic winters. And the horse goes lumpety-lumpety-lump, I say. Or clumpity-clump or cloppity-clop. Its tail goes wiggily-waggily. This horse has a friend, a squirrel, who goes hippity-hoppity, its tail a whirly-twirly, its teeth a snappity-crackity. Fiddle-de-dee said the bumble bee and I laugh and laugh, flying away on the wings of my words then zooming back to lay them like a magic carpet at my children's Reeboked feet. Aw, that's sissy stuff, says Max. Yeh, stupid, adds Jack. Geez! Who cares about a dumb old horse or a squirrel named Whisky Frisky. So I stick them in front of the upstairs TV for the rest of their lives, let them fight undisturbed over the remote, and wait. This year their father bought them a Rambo Christmas and they pull on camouflage clothing, strap on toy submachine guns and fire rounds into me until their ammo clips are empty. They get mad when I refuse to drop to the floor and play dead. Here is the story I tell myself. I live in a nice house in a nice town with an alcoholic husband and two contemptuous kids. Spring does come as springs do. Then another and another right on schedule. But I like to think crocuses and daffodils and budding trees have nothing to do with a rotating mass in space turning on its axis. I like to think that old man winter just gets tired of weaving snowflakes, icicle trees and snow blankets and simply takes a break to survey the damage: tally the number of body bags zipped, anti-depressants and pints of alcohol sold, pounds gained per person. [End Page 117] I begin to dream. Sometimes I am a waitress on the early shift, my hair battened down by a bun, eight bobby pins and a hairnet, my eyelids patches of pale blue...

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